


Boys Next Door/Assholes

by scarredsodeep



Category: Fall Out Boy
Genre: Alternate Universe, Awkwardness, Coming Out, Fluff, Gay Awakening, Humor, M/M, Neighbors, Patrick is a boy next door, Summer, Summer Romance, Tales from 2004, The main difference between this and canon is that Patrick moved away from Chicago as a kid, every summer trope, pete is an asshole, stage fright, summer before college
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-02
Updated: 2018-05-25
Packaged: 2019-03-26 00:58:29
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 13
Words: 44,623
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13846707
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scarredsodeep/pseuds/scarredsodeep
Summary: The last place Patrick wants to be the month before he goes away to college is stuck in his dad's snooty suburb. Especially now that he knows the neighbors' asshole son Pete is back in town...





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> HELLO AND WELCOME! The sun's coming out, my stomach's full of butterflies, and it's about time I wrote a fluffy summer Peterick tropefest, isn't it? I've had this fic stuck in my head for a long time; I'm really excited to finally be writing it down.
> 
> Updates on Fridays! Enjoy the accompanying [summer boyfriends jams.](https://open.spotify.com/user/marvelgirl238/playlist/3gcb1HSwSWvjNb6r5l66Nx)

 

Patrick Stump finds himself standing in his dad’s front yard, craning his neck around and bending at all angles, testing different positions on this lawn and the neighbors’, trying desperately to determine whether, if someone was wanking on the top of the bunk bed in the second bedroom, you’d be able to see them. He’s been operating on the principle that you can’t. He’s been living this last, reckless week like he was invisible up there.

Now he knows the Wentzes’ older, asshole son is,  _ for some unknowable reason _ , back in town. Back in the house next to this one. Back in  _ possible view of Patrick’s activities _ .

So here he is, panicking in the yard, praying no one inquires as to what he’s doing. He tried this same experiment under cover of nightfall, but of course the results were inconclusive: under those visual conditions, he couldn’t determine what might have been seen in daylight. So here he is. Jumping up and down in the middle of fucking suburbia, his heart hammering and his face flushed with embarrassed heat just in  _ anticipation  _ of someone interacting with him. If a single Wentz comes out of that house, Patrick knows with complete certainty he will drop dead on the spot.

God, he hates visiting his dad.

 

So, flashback to yesterday, when Patrick first ruined his life:

It’s the humid, lazy type of July with days that stretch endless, the air itself seeming to sweat, heat rising up from baking sidewalks like a desert mirage. Patrick, eighteen years old and with fuck-all to do, lays on the top bunk in the room he used to share with his brother and tries not to let his limbs touch each other. The air is thick as smothering. He’s suspended somewhere between drowsy and horny. He leaves for college in little over a month; he’s really just killing time til then.

He’s staying with his dad in the swanky Wilmette neighborhood he’s never liked, big lawns and 3-story houses that make the cozy place he lives with his mom in northern Michigan look like a hovel. He never managed to make friends during his visits to Illinois, and no matter how many times his mom assures him, “You’ll make friends with the neighborhood kids,” he’s 90% sure that only works for ages 12 and under. (His mom also keeps saying, “Just try to bond with your father for two weeks, Patrick. He’s paying your tuition, you know.”) Doesn’t matter what anyone else says: the week he’s spent here so far has epically sucked.

Hot and bored in an empty house, he’s been masturbating a lot.

Patrick rolls onto his side so he can look out the window, peering down at the muggy, cicada-droning world. Idly, he slips his hands down the waistband of his shorts and takes hold of himself. He touches himself curiously, lazily, enjoying the sensation without any particular goal. He watches the sun-dappled street, the tepid breeze stirring tree leaves, the infrequent passersby. His brain blanks out, placid as the distant grind of someone’s lawnmower, and gives himself over to touch. His guitar-callused fingers skid over sensitive skin, his grip strong from drumming; a slow, warm urgency gathers. He bites his lip, an intention beginning to form. He wants to bury himself in the fine golden hum of this feeling. His stroke quickens, his dick slicking the motion with leaking precome. His eyelids flutter, his chest going tight with speeded breathing. The lawnmower roars louder. The sweaty, shirtless mower moves into view; Patrick lets his gaze linger on the long, browned planes of that body, the places where sweat gathers, where salt—

The man mowing the lawn turns his head suddenly, as if feeling Patrick’s gaze. He looks  _ right exactly _ towards the window Patrick’s in. Even with sunglasses hiding the eyes, his face is striking—unforgettable— _ familiar _ . Patrick comes with a jolt in the same moment recognition hits.

So that’s how he knows Pete’s in town.

 

One moment of panicked, orgasmic, can’t-tell-with-mirrored-sunnies possible eye contact. One fatal, catastrophic moment to undo Patrick’s entire life. It might not seem like much, if you don’t know Pete Wentz.

Patrick has been avoiding Pete Wentz since the summer of 1996. The summer of the slip’n’slide incident. Patrick was 12, okay? Unexplained random erections (U.R.E.s, the folks at NASA call them) could strike at any time. It wasn’t like he  _ wanted _ to pop a boner in a soaked swimsuit while playing in the hose with his brother and the other older boys. It wasn’t like he  _ wanted _ to be permanently humiliated, like he wanted someone to yell  _ eeeeew, Patrick’s got a woodie! _ , like he wanted to be chased back home with being blasted in the back with the hose, the other boys  _ including his brother _ jeering, hurling water balloons, and untapping new depths of homophobic slurs. It’s not like he wanted to end up crying so hard he gave himself a fever and his mom had to drive down and pick him up early from his month at his dad’s. Patrick’s not even gay. It was just a U.R.E.  _ They happen _ .

Patrick tended to get sick right before he had to go to his dad’s house for, like, ever after that. The only reason the incident didn’t ruin his life entirely was because the kids in his dad’s neighborhood lived so far from Patrick’s Michigan school district that it might as well have been a foreign country.  He didn’t really feel safe until Pete finally went away to college the next year. The little blue car with the shitty muffler that arrived, tires screeching and music blaring, at all hours of the night—the unsupervised weekend parties—the attractive, laughing teens lounging by the pool in the backyard—the garage band practices—the idiotic physical stunts and the amateur video cameras—all of it vanished from the peripheral of his visits to his dad’s house. Patrick was too young to really interrogate the intensity of his relief, at the time. After all, Pete wasn’t even the ringleader of the pack of bullies. (He is, however, the one who shouted,   _ I can see his Patrick Stump _ , a trauma from which Patrick will never recover.) Yet Patrick has been avoiding him with total mortification since—again— _ 1996 _ . 

So of course he’d possibly make eye contact with Pete Wentz at the exact second that he climaxed.  _ Of course he would _ .

Going to college isn’t far enough, Patrick decides. He’s moving to Tanzania.

 

“Let’s barbecue out back tonight, Patster,” Patrick’s dad suggests, obnoxiously cheerful with beer in hand. His dad, a professional folk singer who is successful by the metrics of professional folk singers, works long, strange hours. For all that Patrick is supposedly here to bond with him, he kind of suspects his dad has no idea what to do with him. Well, Patrick doesn’t know what to do with his dad, either. This visit can’t go by fast enough.

Of course his dad wants to hang out outside, he thinks, after yesterday’s incident. That’s on par for how this summer has been going.

Patrick is jumpier than a prey animal while his dad flips steaks and tinfoil-wrapped potatoes on the grill, whistling and bobbing to music only he can hear. This much they have in common: the universe holds particular melodies, and Patrick’s inherited his dad’s gift to tap into them. That’s why he’s headed to the San Francisco Conservatory of Music next month—to be classically trained in that which comes naturally. 

His dad wants to eat outside, so they balance plates on their knees on the patio loungers. His dad clumsily tries to chat him up while Patrick scans the Wentz yard with the hypervigilance of a combat soldier. “You know, Northwestern’s only 20 minutes from here,” his dad’s saying. “Their music college is one of the best in the country.”

“I know, Dad,” says Patrick. His dad guest lectures there a few times a semester. He can never quite stop bragging about it. “Didn’t have the grades for it. Anyway, things happen in California.”

“Is that why you want to go to San Francisco?” his dad asks. “For the…  _ things _ happening?”

Patrick has no idea what his dad is getting at and is not interested in guessing. “Why are we still talking about a decision I made months ago,” he asks sullenly. He is not being a good dining companion. He keeps shrinking smaller and smaller, trying to be invisible from the view of the Wentz house.

Then Patrick’s worst nightmare materializes. The sliding glass door of the Wentz house opens, and Dale Wentz steps onto the back porch. Of course she makes a beeline to the fence. “Is that little Patrick?” she calls.

Patrick’s dad, hellbent on humiliating him, begins waving enthusiastically to the neighbor. “Yup! But not so little, Dale—he’s heading off to  _ college _ in just a few weeks.” The pride in his dad’s voice is  _ so embarrassing _ .

“Both of us have boys in town, then!” Mrs. Wentz says sunnily. “I’ll have to tell Pete you’re here, Patrick. I’m sure he’ll want to say hi.”

“So he—he hasn’t mentioned that I’m here? I mean. He doesn’t know. He hasn’t—seen me?” Patrick asks in a strangled rush. He could not blush any more.

“He’s been so bored,” Patrick’s dad says in a much more normal tone. “He’d love to see Pete.”

“Um, no, that’s really okay. We don’t even know each other,” Patrick blurts out.

Mrs. Wentz winks hugely at him for reasons he cannot begin to understand. “That won’t last long,” she says with a laugh Patrick experiences as ominous. “My Pete’s a little  _ too _ good at making friends.”

Patrick says too sharply, “I’m leaving really soon.” He is desperate to escape this situation and yet, for some reason, cannot stop talking.

Patrick’s dad turns to him, crestfallen. “Are you?” he asks. “I was hoping you’d stay for the Square Roots festival. Your old man’s headlining, you know.”

Patrick is ready for death. He shoves a choking hazard-sized chunk of steak into his mouth, just to buy time. Then he swallows badly and almost  _ does _ choke. The universe is clearly at the ready, squaring off, like  _ go ahead, wish for death again, I dare you _ . 

“I’ll leave you men to your meat,” Mrs. Wentz says into the awkward silence of Patrick’s faux pas and subsequent near-death. “See you at the fireworks on the 4th?”

“Count on it!” says Patrick’s dad. His enthusiasm sounds a little wilted, even to Patrick’s ears.

It’s hard to feel very bad about hurting your dad’s feelings when you’re having a masturbation-related panic attack. Patrick announces with false cheeriness, “Well, I’m stuffed. See you later, Dad.” And he leaves his mostly-full plate behind, taking shelter inside before anymore Wentzes can appear.

 

Patrick’s still awake, jittery and anxious and feeling pent-up, at 4am. He can’t stay in this house any longer. He doesn’t know why he’s so shaken up, but he needs to  _ move _ . He pulls on a t-shirt from his laundry pile and slips out of his dad’s house as quietly as possible.

This close to Chicago, the stars are muted. It’s not like Michigan. Patrick wonders what his life would be like if he’d grown up here instead, if his mom had gotten Illinois in the divorce or if his parents had stayed married. God, maybe he really would have been friends with Pete Wentz, or invested in the hardcore music scene in Chicago instead of pursuing the pop-and-soul siren song of his heart. He shudders in the balmy July air. Thanks but no thanks. His likes his life just fine as it is. Or at least, he plans to start liking it just as soon as he lands in California.

The suburbs at night are surreal. Everything’s so well-manicured and motionless. The sprinklers silently nourish pointlessly green front yards. Front porch lights glow; trash cans line up at the curbs. There’s no one out here. It’s like a level in a horror video game, right before everything goes to hell. The sky is touched with purple-blue at the very edges, promising dawn. Darkness is different at night than it is in early morning.

Patrick doesn’t have any particular destination in mind. He wanders towards the little playground across the street and plants himself on a creaky metal swing. The links are cool and gummy under his hands. He pushes off the woodchipped earth and pumps his legs, feeling a pleasant emptiness as he climbs into the air. The apex of his arc squeezes his guts and for part of a second he is suspended; then he falls. His body cuts a perfect symmetry through the early morning. He thinks of nothing. Through movement, he begins to still.

His position on the swing gives him a perfect vantage point to watch a bicycle weave slowly up the street. It lists from side to side, wobbling up the slight hill, the only thing other than himself he’s seen move out here. He watches with a detached curiosity until, with comical slowness, it plows directly into the Wentz mailbox and spills onto its side, dropping its rider ungracefully to the curb.

Patrick is pretty sure the bike was moving too slowly for the rider to be hurt, but his interest is hooked now. He lets himself fly from the swing at its highest point, weightless for one brief, nostalgic moment before he falls to the earth. He lands on his feet, barely; his shins complain of the impact. Then he’s trotting down the subtle hill and towards the crash site.

A person wearing jeans and a red t-shirt is on his hands and knees in the gutter. He tries to get up and falls back down twice in the time it takes Patrick to get to him. “Are you okay?” Patrick asks, a little out of breath from his embarrassingly short jog.

Skinned, blood-spotted hands are offered up to him. The gutter person looks up through long, dark bangs and says, “Help.”

Patrick takes Pete Wentz by the wrists and hauls him to his feet. Pete stumbles, tripping over his own ankles, and goes right back down. He lands on his ass in the damp grass and pulls Patrick down with him. 

Pete is laughing. Of course he is. He’s always been an asshole. “You’re drunk,” Patrick accuses this virtual stranger he hasn’t interacted with in 6 years.

“Very!” Pete slurs happily. “S’why I didn’t drive. Couldn’t even—” he hiccups loudly—“bike straight. Should ge’ a helmet. Not good at straight.”

Patrick’s angry and embarrassed and completely at a loss as to what the fuck his emotions are doing, all at once. He can’t figure out why he’s reacting so strongly to a stranger. This whole summer has been so gut-curdling and sour. He’s crabby at everyone. He’s just—ready for the rest of his life to begin. He’s ready to know who he is, where he’s going, where he belongs.

“Rick, right?” Pete asks beside him.

Self-conscious in his boxers and a dirty Cher tour shirt, Patrick hugs his pale knees. He’d get up, run away, go inside, but he doesn’t want to be in there, either. He doesn’t want to be anywhere tonight. 

“Patrick, usually,” he corrects. Even though it makes no sense, he’s kind of offended Pete doesn’t remember. A list of things Patrick has not been able to forget about  _ him: _ the tattoo low on his belly, indelible and dark when he had to be too young to legally get tattoos; the etched lines of his hipbones; his clinging orange swim trunks; his dark curl of his armpit hair; the sound of his mocking laugh. Playing with Legos in his basement. Having nightmares after he and Kevin watched an R-rated movie one afternoon while his dad worked in his home studio and Patrick hid behind the couch with the dog. Pete patting his hair in a way that was comforting but infuriating too during the grisliest scenes of the movie. Popsicles staining tongues and sidewalks cherry-red outside the Wentz house. Patrick remembers it all.

“Patrick,” Pete repeats, smiling like the word is something delicious. “Threw a snowball a’ your window las’ Chrissmas. You get it?”

“You know which one is my window?” Patrick asks. Now that Pete mentions it, he  _ does _ remember waking up to something striking his window in the middle of the night. It scared the shit out of him. He convinced himself it was a bird or a goose or something, laid awake while his heart rate slowed enough to go back to sleep. If he’d gotten out of bed, would he have seen Pete’s shit-eating grin gleaming in starlight, two stories below? What an absolute asshole.

Drunk Pete thinks this is totally hilarious, and lets out a great braying, spraying laugh. “‘Course I know that,” he slurs happily. “Otherwise where’d I throw snowballs?”

With an unearned familiarity and disregard for personal space that sets Patrick’s skin ablaze, Pete lists towards him, knocking his bony shoulder, arm, and elbow into Patrick’s soft side. “Why’re you here?” he asks.

“It’s developmentally appropriate for  _ me _ to live at home,” Patrick says haughtily. He scoots further from Pete. “Why are  _ you _ here?”

“No good at living my life in order,” Pete says, shrugging. “Bad at college. Bad at being alone. Very, very bad at having jobs. Good at trouble, though. Got a merit badge in DUIs and hospitals.”

This does and does not answer the question. Patrick sighs. He wants to keep being pissed, but he’s running out of fuel for anger. Pete’s a verified asshole, sure, but he’s being nice enough right now. For the first time tonight, Patrick feels kind of tired. “You’ll make scout in no time,” Patrick says. Then, because Pete’s being honest and Patrick is being a brick wall, he offers, “I’m here to see my dad before I go to college.”

“Northwestern?” Pete asks immediately. “For music? S’close to here.”

It’s been a million years since Patrick was a kid spying on the band practices next door. How does Pete remember that he’s into music after all this time?

“San Francisco,” Patrick says. Is it the light, or does Pete look disappointed?

Pete burps, loud and oblivious. “Big gay San Fr’cisco,” he says. Patrick squirms, uncomfortable. Is that what people think when he says San Francisco? There’s other things the city is known for! Golden Gate Bridge! Ghiradelli Square! That really hilly street! Ripley’s Believe It Or Not! (Okay, Patrick’s running out of things the city is known for quickly.)

Pete tries to bump him companionably again but falls over entirely, off-balance. He ends up pillowed against Patrick’s chest like he meant to be, looking up at Patrick’s frowning face. “Won’t remember this in the morning,” Pete says. “That means I can say anything. Didn’t really forget your name, Patrick Stump.”

Patrick’s mouth is dry. He wants to shove Pete off him of him but he’s afraid to move. Something terrible has happened. He’s far too old for this, but the air is balmy, the breeze is cool, his boxers are thin—U.R.E.s just  _ happen _ , even, apparently, when you’re 18, they just  _ strike opportunistically  _ at the  _ worst possible moments _ —

Pete, drunk and sensation-seeking, nuzzles his face against Patrick’s chest. Patrick’s not breathing. “Your turn,” Pete presses. “S’like magic. C’mon, say something true.”

But Patrick  _ will _ remember this in the morning. He just—he needs to get out of here before Pete notices he’s half-hard, his dick thick and inconvenient against his inner thigh. It seems like cooperating might get him out of this situation faster than protesting. Patrick casts about for a truth that won’t cost him much and comes up empty-handed. His boner is intensifying at the same rate as his panic. He needs to escape. Like an idiot, he says, “I’m worried you saw me jacking off yesterday.”

Pete’s eyes go wide with delight. He laughs so hard it rattles Patrick’s ribcage. His canines slip over his bottom lip with his insensible, lazy smile. “Oh, he is  _ honest _ . Gonna get me in s’much trouble.”

Patrick’s face burns with his own stupidity. Of all the things he could have said.  _ Of all the people he could have said it to. _ He scrambles out from under Pete gracelessly. “Goodnight,” he mumbles. This whole thing is a disaster. He runs for his dad’s house, not caring this time that the exertion steals away his breath. Pete is behind him laughing on the lawn, drunk and bloody-handed. Patrick does not look back.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> IT WAS THE FOURTH OF JULY!
> 
> (happy reading)
> 
> [tunes for being 18 and full of nerve endings](https://open.spotify.com/user/marvelgirl238/playlist/3gcb1HSwSWvjNb6r5l66Nx)

 

Patrick can’t stay cooped up in the house all day, mostly because his dad keeps trying to talk to him. He wakes up in the early afternoon, feeling slightly feverish and time-slipped after staying up all night. His dad is sitting on the couch when he stumbles down the stairs, bleary and in search of water. 

“I remember those days,” his dad says fondly. “Rolling out of bed at all hours of the day!” Patrick has been living here one week and has already seen his dad sleep past noon on two separate occasions.

“Not good at sleeping at night,” Patrick says, but the cadence of his own voice reminds him of Pete on the lawn last night. He shakes his head like he can erase the brand from his brain, Etch-a-Sketch style. He stayed up til sunrise, pacing his room and starting to jerk off and then interrogating why he wanted to do it, what he was thinking about. Whenever he closed his eyes, he’d hear Pete’s words echo in his head. He wished on them like murky suburban stars: be true, be true, be true.  _ Won’t remember in the morning; that means I can say anything _ .

So when his dad says, “Well, you’re just in time for my famous French toast,” Patrick absolutely cannot handle it.

“Uh, I really was hoping to,” says Patrick, and then can’t think of an excuse. There’s a pause that goes on too long. “Go for a bike ride,” Patrick finishes horribly. It’s the first thing he can think of. The only thing he wants to do less than ride a bicycle right now is eat French toast with his dad, so technically, it works as an excuse.

“Sure thing!” his dad says with forced brightness. It’s obvious he’s trying not to seem disappointed. Patrick does not have the energy for any of this. “You can use my bike. Tell you what, we’ll carb up when you get home.”

And so: Patrick ends up going on a fucking bike ride. He curves aimless through his dad’s neighborhood. He thinks about how if this was more like E.T., he could launch into space and leave earth behind entirely. It’s sweating weather, a time of year that can only be described as The Swelter, and his longish ginger hair gathers damp at the base of his neck. At least his hat keeps the sun out of his eyes. At least he doesn’t know anyone who lives in this fucking neighborhood, to witness the humiliation that is cardiovascular activity. 

The bike makes his legs burn and his pits sweat, but it  _ is _ nice to be moving. He’s been shriveling up at his dad’s, just—killing time. In a hurry to get to the next thing. It feels nice to be out here in the sun, like this current thing is worth enjoying too. Patrick’s mood is taking a turn for the better when he hears the telltale heavy-drum, amp-feedback sound of band practice in a garage. He’s never been in a band—he’s more of a solo artist—and that feels fine, one less fixture to dismantle so he can get the hell out. Still, there’s a version of Patrick that dreamed of shit like this: garage practices and gymnasium shows, other people who understood and were invested in his music. That dream dissolves now, in the July sun of his 18th year. Everything feels like it’s already ended. The sound of clattering sticks and unmic’ed shouting unfurls a startlingly huge sense of anemoia in Patrick’s belly. He pedals towards the sound.

He coasts up a smooth driveway, comes to a sweaty stop outside an open garage. A kid with short, bleach-blond hair is spinning around with his guitar, getting hopelessly tangled in the cord and coming dangerously close to toppling into the brown-haired bassist; a guy with arm tattoos and curly, shoulder-length hair is pounding furiously at a drum kit; and a black-haired dude is screaming hoarse into the dead mic cupped in his hands. As Patrick watches, the singer drops to his knees and folds over the garage floor, screaming out the last hoarse, scraping notes of the song.

The band breaks when the song ends, chatting to each other, adjusting their instruments, milling around and offering notes. Patrick is about to offer some kind of friendly compliment when the singer looks up from where he’s kneeling on the ground. He shoves his long straightened bangs out of his heavily lined eyes and shows his unreasonably sharp teeth in a slow smile. He looks right at Patrick. “Hey, neighbor,” says Pete. “Wanna play?”

Patrick kicks off the driveway to get the bike in motion. Without a word, he steers in the opposite direction and rides away.

 

Patrick feels kind of bad about dodging his dad all week, so he agrees to the neighborhood picnic without fuss. His dad makes some kind of layered cream-and-berries dish, further illustrating how little Patrick really knows about the guy, and Patrick carries the cooler of beer. His dad spreads out a blanket in the park at the end of the block and starts introducing Patrick to neighbors. Patrick sets up the trifle on a picnic table of other desserts. Younger children chase each other with water guns and sparklers.

There’s only one other person who looks Patrick’s age who got roped into family 4th activities. Beer in hand, Patrick’s dad makes the introduction.

“Joe, this is my son Patrick, the one who takes after me,” he says proudly. “Pat, this is Joe Trohman. I used to give him guitar lessons.”

“I’m mostly self-taught now,” Joe says, friendly. “So if my fingering is sloppy, don’t blame your dad.”

But Patrick can’t even move his mouth in greeting, because he recognizes this kid. Bleach blond and whippet-thin, he’s the guitarist whose band practice Patrick fled. “Saw you play,” Patrick finally manages to grate out.

“Hey, you’re the guy on the bike! You should hang out next time, play with us.”

“I’ll think about it,” says Patrick vaguely at the same time his dad says, “He’d love to!”

Joe looks from father to son, half-smiling. “Cool. We’re practicing tonight, after the fireworks. Figured on good old Independence Day, no one would complain about a little noise.”

And Patrick is suddenly on the hook for more than he bargained for.

 

Dusk and the picnic-goers are settling onto blankets, pointing themselves at the sky. Patrick sits down beside his dad and prepares to be underwhelmed. 

Then someone pokes him in the back with a sneaker. Pat twists and finds himself looking up at Pete Wentz.

“Hey, Rick,” Pete says, smirking. “Long time no see.” It is impossible to tell if he’s alluding to their conversation the other night, making a joke, or if he’s kept his word and forgotten it. He’s wearing a polo with a popped collar and American flag-print board shorts.  _ Asshole _ .

Patrick tries to call his bluff. “You know that’s not my name,” he says coolly.

His dad smacks Patrick’s shoulder. “You’re not going to make friends at college like that!” he cajoles. Pete lets out a big good-natured guffaw. Patrick wants to choke him out. “No worries, Mr. Stump. He’s right. He goes by Patrick, or at least he did when we were kids.”

There’s so much mischief in Pete’s eyes, there’s no way of knowing what he does and does not remember. So Patrick simply must live with the possibility that Pete has not only watched him get off while watching Pete, but also heard him confess it. Fuck the suburbs, fuck the whole Midwest. Patrick wishes he was moving to California _tomorrow_.

Pete nudges Patrick with his shoe again. “Anyway, I didn’t come over here to be an ass. I came over to ask if you wanted to watch the fireworks with me and the guys? Joe said you were coming by later.”

At least this, Patrick knows the answer to, even if he doesn’t understand what the inside of his body is doing at the thought of sitting besides Pete in the dark, their knuckles brushing, watching multicolor stars burst and explode and rain down upon them. “Thanks, but I’m here to spend time with my dad,” demurs Patrick. “Maybe I’ll catch up with you guys later, though,” he adds, expertly laying the groundwork to bail.

His dad chooses this moment to say the least helpful possible thing. Patrick considers that his father may in fact be a Terminator programmed to destroy him. “Go on, Patster,” he urges. “Maybe I’ll cruise by later and jam with you guys. Have fun!”

Patrick has no choice but to go with Pete.

 

“ _ Bombs bursting in air… the rockets’ red glare… _ there’s a punk song in here, guys,” Pete tells his friends. The guys from the garage, who, in addition to Joe, are named Andy and Tim, loose an assortment of groans.

“Never join a band with Pete,” Joe advises Patrick. “He’s maniacal about lyrics.” 

“They all have to  _ mean something _ ,” Andy, the drummer, adds.

“ _ And _ be clever,” says Tim, the bassist.

“And then he just screams them anyway and no one knows what he’s even saying,” concludes Joe.

Patrick laughs. He’s really trying to have a bad attitude about this whole situation, but it turns out, Pete-the-asshole is friends with some cool guys. They are laying on their backs, staring at the sky. Patrick feels the detonation of each firework in his gut, vibrating through his insides. The tightness in his chest, the speeding of his heart, the way his skin seems to be soaking up sensation so every touch of grass is almost too much, the way the colors smear and spin against the black—this is from the fireworks and the fireworks only. 

A golden streak explodes into fizzing, spreading branches, a hissing palm tree against the sky. Pete turns his head, his mouth a few inches from Patrick’s ear, and murmurs, “Those’re my favorite. The sizzle gives me goosebumps.” To prove it, Pete takes Patrick’s hand and puts it on his bare arm. Pete’s skin, bumpy and raised, prickles under Patrick’s touch.

Patrick is feeling a little short of breath. Is it possible he has a grass allergy? His little sister has asthma. You never know. Pete keeps his hand on top of Patrick’s, holding it against his arm. Patrick’s heart is no longer beating. He can feel Pete watching him, his face turned away from the lightshow. Patrick rivets his gaze to the heavens and tries not to think about how stupid he probably looks in profile. He doubly tries not to think about why he’d  _ care _ whether he looks stupid in profile.

Pete keeps his hand pinned all the way through the grand finale. Patrick can’t tell if it’s an accident or it means something, the way Pete will occasionally stroke his thumb. Because Pete is a magnet for U.R.E.s and Patrick really,  _ really  _ doesn’t want another trip down middle school lane, he remains vigilant to any untoward sensations from his below-the-belt region. The extra attention makes it worse, if anything. His dick is aching with sensitivity. A strong breeze could give him a boner right now.

When the fireworks finally end, Patrick leaps off the blanket with massive relief, leaving Pete’s confusing touch behind. The others are still laying on their backs, so he tries to mask his urgency as musical enthusiasm. He claps his hands together, awkwardly gung-ho. “So let’s, uh, tickle the ivories, gang!” he says idiotically. “Get down to the… music-making.”

Joe’s the first one laughing, but the others follow. In no time, they’re all howling. Patrick blushes cherry-bomb red in the night.

On the walk back, Joe and Tim pass a joint back and forth. Patrick watches Andy and Pete both decline, so he doesn’t feel weird about saying no when they offer. The cicadas hum, reserved tonight with the sounds of firecrackers, bombettes, and small-time mortars all around them. Spent sparklers litter the sidewalks. The night echoes with kids’ shrieks. There’s a tension and a possibility that Patrick associates with summer nights, the restless feeling that he might go anywhere, do anything, that a polite agreement with gravity is the only thing keeping him in one place.

Patrick watches them play, trying to make sure he’s looking at everyone an equal amount of time and not being a fucking weirdo. Some of their songs are catchy, but Pete is a terrible singer, he thinks privately. He generates all this energy like a berserker and just smashes himself apart, throwing himself at the ground, kicking off walls, jumping off the shitty couch, generally acting like he’s in a mosh pit and not at band practice. He’s bleeding from two separate places Patrick can see after the first three songs. This is why Patrick’s not into hardcore.

“What do you play?” Joe asks him, wiping sweat off his forehead between songs. “Other than  _ the ivories _ .”

Patrick hates this question. There’s no way to list all his instruments without sounding pretentious, and it’s a bad combo of facetious and narcissistic to say  _ everything _ . “Oh, you know,” he says instead, a meaningless phrase that conveys no information. 

Joe shrugs out of his guitar and hands it to Patrick. “Oookay. This is a guitar. Do you think you can do something with it?”

Patrick’s embarrassment splits into a grin. He ducks his head. Joe knows his dad, right? Joe probably already knows Patrick can play everything in this garage and then some. “Uh, yes,” he says. Joe claps him on the shoulder companionably and slumps over to the couch, inviting, “Then dazzle us.”

Patrick’s more of a solo guy, so it’s a weird adjustment, playing with other people. They’re all looking to him for the cue, so he settles on something he figures everyone born after the year 1980 will know. He plays the opening riff for Michael Jackson’s  _ Beat It _ and is gratified when Andy laughs and jumps in with percussion, nodding. Tim catches onto the bassline quick enough, but Pete just stands there with his mic. It’s not a song he can break his body to; it needs a different kind of build, a different type of expressiveness. It’s not til Joe starts heckling him that Pete shakes off his surprise and starts to sing. He hits the notes competently enough, but the emotion is all wrong. His voice is rough and emo, more like a raspy baritone whine than the playful tenor of Michael. Patrick can’t help himself: he starts singing too, softly at first, hoping to guide Pete in the right direction. As the song builds, though, Patrick, in spite of himself, gets louder. It’s a song made for full-voiced, no-holds-barred singing, and by the end, Patrick’s belting it, close-eyed and prickling with sweat. It’s not until the final note that he opens his eyes and realizes everyone’s staring at him.

He breathes hard through his mouth, asking himself too late why he can’t seem to make any choices around Pete Wentz that  _ don’t _ relate back to masturbation. 

“Holy shit, Patrick,” Joe says eloquently from the couch. 

“You can fucking  _ sing _ ,” says Pete. He sets his dead mic on the ground gingerly, like it’s a grenade, and steps back from it, doing a little  _ I am not worthy _ bow. “I’m retiring from vocals. Patrick sings in our band now.”

“I get the feeling Patrick could be the whole band,” Andy says. He hugs his drumsticks possessively to his bare, sweaty chest. “Stay away from the drums. They’re mine!”

Tim slings a consoling arm over Pete’s shoulders. “You had a good run, man. Maybe it’s not too late to go back to soccer.”

Patrick is blushing so hard he can’t see straight. This is why he doesn’t like playing with other people. Forget how it felt, having a band backing him, playing in sync with other people, anticipating and responding to each other’s moves. Forget how it felt harmonizing with Pete, the older boy’s forehead pressed sweaty against Patrick’s shoulder, the way Pete’s lips felt when Pete sang into his cheek,  _ don’t want to be a boy, you want to be a man _ . It’s so fucking embarrassing to be talented. He works hard—so incredibly hard—to be good. But then, when he performs, when everyone’s looking at him? The audience in this garage is too big for him; the real reason he’s attending the SF Conservatory is because that’s the only audition he didn’t completely freeze up and/or puke at. How is he ever going to get up on a stage?

But then—remember how it felt, having a band backing him, having Pete’s forehead pressed against his shoulder. He didn’t feel nauseous then. He almost kind of  _ liked _ it.

He passes the guitar back to Joe gratefully, bows out of the rest of the practice. He watches the band work together, the camaraderie, the way they anticipate and feel each other. Pete doesn’t hang on anyone else. Patrick carefully forms no opinions about this. He thinks they’re pretty good, for a hardcore band. He even enjoys himself.

After, walking home with Pete, there’s a moment under a streetlight. Pete knocks his shoulder against Patrick, once, twice, til Patrick looks back at him, rocking on his heels in the captured yellow light. “What?” Patrick asks. He can feels the tops of his ears getting hot.

“I like you, Patrick Stump,” Pete says, looking back and forth from the wiggling toes of his sneakers to Patrick’s moonlit face. He says it smiling, but he sounds sincere. A long beat—space for Patrick to answer, which Patrick declines. Pete puts his hands in his pockets, shrugging his shoulders up around his ears. He looks ridiculous, Patrick thinks. Like an asshole. Those are the only thoughts he has whatsoever about how Pete looks under that streetlight.

“Do you like me?” Pete presses, giving him this hangdog look that probably works on everyone.

“Nope,” Patrick says, shaking his head so the light streaks blurred across his visual field. “Not even a little.”

Pete grins shy at the asphalt, exactly like Patrick has said  _ yes _ . Pete starts walking again, a little bounce in his step now. It sets Patrick instantly scowling. “I said  _ no _ ,” he mutters, but Pete might as well not even hear him. He knocks his shoulder against Patrick’s again, bumping up against him happily. “I hope I see you again tomorrow,” Pete tells him. “I hope you decide to stay in Chicago forever.”

 

Patrick’s dad is playing his acoustic on the back porch when Patrick gets home. Patrick sticks his head out the sliding glass door. He feels giddy and bright, his arm fizzing and sizzling like fireworks where it brushed against Pete’s the whole way home. “Dad?” he asks. He has to bite his lips to keep from smiling.

“What’s up, kid?”

“I was thinking—would it be okay with you if I didn’t go home on Monday? I mean, if I stayed with you a little longer?”

Patrick’s dad’s face lights up. He plays an excited little trill up the neck of his guitar. “No, it would not be okay. It would be  _ fantastic _ !” he says.

“See, this is the kind of quality dad content I need more of,” Patrick laughs. For once, he’s too happy to be annoyed.

 

Patrick goes upstairs, gets in bed, and gets himself off. He watches out the window, his breath coming hard, and does not think about what he’s looking for. When he comes, he sees exploding stars.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ham sammies, pool parties, and revelations.
> 
> Thanks for reading, as always! [Enjoy some tunes](https://open.spotify.com/user/marvelgirl238/playlist/3gcb1HSwSWvjNb6r5l66Nx), enjoy the vibe, and find some sunshine this weekend. See you guys next week. <3

 

Pete said  _ I hope I get to see you tomorrow _ , but Patrick’s innocently eating a ham sandwich at the keyboard he has set up in his room when he sees a whole lot of Pete seeing someone else.

He’s not even being a creep, on this occasion. He’s got his keyboard in front of the side window, which faces directly onto the second-story eaves of the Wentz roof. The last thing he’s expecting to see 20 feet off the ground is the bare entirety of Pete Wentz’s back. His mouth drops open and ham sandwich falls out. It’s so embarrassing he’s honestly surprised no one witnesses it. For once he can’t even focus on his own humiliation, though: he’s too busy watching Pete glitter in the fucking sun. Pete leans over, his pants slipping lower on the curve of his ass and still no underwear in sight, and pulls a girl in a bikini out of his bedroom window.

Patrick’s brain goes blank for a second with the idea that he sleeps so close to Pete’s bedroom window, but then Pete leans in and playfully bites the girl’s bare, tawny collarbone, and Patrick’s sweating. He feels imprints ghosting teeth on his own collarbone, or wants to, his dick waking up with one thick throb. He feels equal parts horny and sick as Pete and the girl lay out a towel on the slanted shingles and spill onto it, tangled together, kissing before they’re all the way down. He watches the girl’s teeth catch the light while she laughs, Pete’s mouth venturing down between her breasts, down her smooth stomach, catching on the protruding bone of her hip. He watches her hands circle Pete’s waist, her fingers slipping down the back of Pete’s waistband.

Forget the keyboard. Forget the ham sandwich. Patrick can’t possibly watch this.

He gets in the shower instead. He pulls his own dick too hard, like he’s punishing it. He comes twice, bitterly, and rests his forehead against the tile, watching it swirl down the drain like fucking nothing.

Literally, he’s fucking nothing.

 

Patrick pretends to be sick and his dad’s really cool about it. He turns the AC way up, installs Patrick on the living room couch with blankets, brings him the odd buffet of fried chicken, rainbow sherbet, saltine crackers, and three cans of soup, and rents a wild assortment of videos: Moulin Rouge, Blackhawk Down, The Fellowship of the Ring, and Spirited Away.

“Dad, this is like the whole New Release section,” Patrick says. He does a shot of NyQuil even though his symptoms are factitious. He  _ is _ nauseous and clammy. Acrid fake cherry stains his tongue red. He does not think about Pete Wentz. He does not think about why he’s not thinking about Pete Wentz.

“I really debated over Monsters Inc,” Patrick’s dad says. “I don’t know what movies you like, son. Or what kind of soup.” He gestures to the comforting spread he’s put together. “I know I wasn’t really around when you were younger. Life on the road made me kind of a bum dad. I still feel bad about missing all your Little League games.”

Patrick, spooning sherbet into his mouth, would really prefer to watch any movie at all over having this conversation. “You did fine, Dad. Also I wasn’t in Little League.”

His dad slumps extravagantly into the couch. “Ah, shit,” he sighs. “You see what I mean? That must have been Kevin.”

“Megan. It was Megan.”

At almost the same moment, the Stump men start to laugh. “Well, I’m glad you’re here now. It means a lot to me that you decided to stay longer. I’m glad I’m not out of chances to learn about your soup preferences.”

“Alphabet,” Patrick says decisively. The other options are chicken tortilla and tomato basil; it’s not really a contest.

His dad snags the soup can off the table. “Five-star feat of culinary achievement coming right up,” he says.

Patrick does another shot of NyQuil and pushes Moulin Rouge to the bottom of the stack. As if he didn’t cry over that movie enough in theaters. The mood he’s in today, he only wants to watch hearts break if it’s by sword.

So: Fellowship of the Ring it is.

 

That night, there’s a knock at the front door. Patrick’s dad, glazed over from hours of cinematic violence, answers. Patrick sinks down further into his blanket nest, out of sight of the door, when he hears Pete’s voice. 

(A few questions: How did it become familiar so quickly? Why is his heart speeding up like that? Why does he care at all, what Pete Wentz does on his roof with random girls? Whatever he felt last night, it’s obvious he imagined it all. Pete under streetlights, Pete’s hand over his, Pete singing against his cheek, the feeling of fireworks bursting all over his skin, powder and spark deep in his bones. Why the fuck did he commit to staying even a single extra day? Now his dad’s all excited about it. The music festival he wants Patrick to go to is  _ two weeks _ from now. Patrick can’t spend his summer this way. He’s sweating and the thermostat is set to 65. Maybe he really  _ is _ ill. Maybe he has a tumor pressing on his brain. It would explain why he’s  _ hallucinating _ things, infusing them with special meaning that isn’t apparent to anyone else. He’s definitely losing his mind.)

(Add all of that to the list of things Patrick isn’t thinking about.)

“Can Patrick come out and play?” Pete asks at the door. Even talking to Patrick’s dad, his voice is salacious, makes Patrick’s blood go all gooey. Patrick becomes more and more convinced his fever is real. Why else would he feel like this?

“You putting together a neighborhood game of Ghost in the Graveyard?” says Patrick’s dad, always chummy, always in good spirits. How irritating, right? Patrick realizes that hiding in the blankets isn’t enough. His dad’s going to involve him in this. Any second now.

“Cops and Robbers,” Pete laughs. “I was hoping to put Patrick in handcuffs.”

God, it’s like getting zapped right in the balls. Patrick chokes on his own breath and starts coughing, drawing attention to himself at the worst possible moment. He grabs a throw pillow and attempts to smother himself, either into silence or outright death, whichever comes first.

Against all odds, his dad comes through. “Patrick’s feeling sick today, I don’t think he’ll be up for any shenanigans tonight,” he says. “But I’ll let him know you stopped by.”

Patrick waits until he hears the door close  _ and  _ lock before he pops his head up above the level of coziness. “Thanks, Dad,” he says.

His dad lopes back into the living room, eyeing Patrick knowingly in a way he does not care for. “I noticed you slithering into hiding in here. What’s up? You avoiding the Wentz kid?”

Patrick looks anywhere but at his dad. “Um,” he stalls. “I mean. He’s just kind of an asshole.”

“Did something happen?” his dad asks. Nope. A thousand times nope. Patrick is not having this conversation. _Yeah, he teased me like six years ago_ , he imagines saying. Or: _no, I just watched him fool around with a girl on the roof this morning and then jacked off so hard I almost passed out_ _and I don’t understand why_.

Instead of answering, Patrick grabs the DVD remote and presses Play. Bullets rain down on sweaty, blood-streaked young men. It’s distracting, anyway. Even if it doesn’t necessarily make Patrick feel any less feverish.

 

In the morning, there is a jar of fireflies on the doorstep. Written on the tin lid in black Sharpie are the words  _ FEEL BETTER _ . Little bugs crawl over sticks and leaves, their bioluminescent butts unremarkable as any insect’s carapace under the morning light.

Patrick doesn’t know what the fuck to do about that.

 

In the afternoon, Dale Wentz calls the house. She leaves a message on the answering machine, her disembodied voice filling the halls. “We’ve got so much leftover food from the picnic, we’re throwing a pool party! Love it if you boys could join us. The tiki torches will be lit at 5, so head on over whenever you see them burning. David, bring your famous margaritas or don’t bother coming. Kidding!” Her laugh, warm and spreading, reminds Patrick of Pete. It is an unwelcome remembrance.

The last thing he wants is to get his unpredictable penis in swim trunks around Pete Wentz. There’s a traumatic history there from which he has never recovered. But he knows that his fun-loving dad is going to be all over this when he hears the message. Patrick hesitates with his finger over the  _ erase _ button on the answering machine. It’s like being tempted by the Dark Side. At the last moment, he drops his hand back to his side. He can’t do it. 

Home alone, Patrick sighs as loud as he wants. Great. Looks like he’s going to a pool party.

 

In the evening, Patrick’s buttoning a garish Hawaiian shirt up to the chin and pulling on a Cubs hat, going for maximum coverage, when the doorbell rings.

“Can you get it?” his dad calls. The owner of many fine Hawaiian disasters, Patrick’s dad is buttoning into his own. He has an embarrassing white triangle of sunscreen on his nose, despite the low angle of the setting sun.

Patrick, who is wearing slightly too-small briefs for compression under his bathing suit, is relieved to find Joe on the doorstep. Joe is wearing pink pool floaties on his arms, a plastic lei around his neck, and a dorky smile. He smacks Patrick with a pool noodle when Patrick opens the door.

Joe has no shirt on, only swim trunks. Patrick doesn’t feel like he has a fever at all. 

“Hey dude!” Joe greets him. He has such an easy smile, Patrick thinks. He likes Joe instinctively. “You coming to the pool party?”

“No, this is my everyday wear,” Patrick deadpans. He feels tremendously better about the whole situation, now that it’s not just going to be Patrick, his dad, Pete’s parents, and Pete in whatever the fuck he thinks makes an appropriate bathing suit. “Are the other guys coming?”

Joe snorts. “They live in the city. They have better things to do than coming out to the ‘burbs, or so they’re always telling me.”

Patrick calls up to let his dad know he’s heading next door, then follows Joe in tramping across the lawn. (He can’t help steal a glance at his own bedroom window. Pete  _ may _ have seen him. He can’t comfortably rule it out.)

Joe’s telling him about a new record he’s excited about; they chatter happily all the way into the Wentzes’ backyard. Joe lets himself in the side gate with an easy familiarity that speaks to long friendship and leads Patrick up to the deck.

He doesn’t even see Pete coming. One minute he’s arguing about a finer point of  _ Kill the Moonlight _ , the next there’s a streak of movement in his periphery and gravity gives way. Patrick is flying sideways,  then falling fast. He hits the water scream-first and immediately starts drowning, his throat filling up with chlorine. 

Patrick claws his way to the surface of the Wentz family pool and finds himself nose to nose with dripping, giggling Pete. He gasps air into his lungs, treading water in a Hawaiian shirt that looks even stupider when wet. On dry land, Joe is howling with laughter.

“You are an asshole,” Patrick pronounces with great dignity.

Pete pulls him towards the shallower end of the pool, til they can both put their feet down and touch bottom.

“I wanted to ask if you’re avoiding me,” Pete says.

Patrick is disproportionately annoyed, perhaps because he’s just been tackled into a swimming pool. He’s hung out with this guy exactly once. Pete couldn’t possibly have enough data points yet to classify Patrick’s avoidance patterns.

“Are you?” Pete asks.

Because there is no reasonable answer to this question, Patrick decides he’d better stop avoiding Pete. “Let me answer your question with another question,” Patrick says. “If I’m avoiding you, why did I come to your pool party?”

“Because you like Joe,” Pete says as if this is very obvious. “Everybody likes Joe.”

“Aaay!” cheers Joe from the dry deck. Somehow, he’s gotten his hands on a margarita.

As Patrick is climbing out of the pool, his dad appears. “Forgot your towel,” he observes. Then he hands Patrick a blended, mini-umbrella’d drink with a wink, solving the marg mystery for once and for all. “Don’t tell your mother,” he says. “Or Pete’s mother.” He puts one hand on Patrick’s wet shoulder, the other on Joe’s. He’s in full cool-dad mode right now, and Patrick could literally die of the embarrassment. “The cocktails are only as virgin as you are, boys!” He does a stage wink that implies he wildly overestimates Patrick’s level of sexual experience.

Patrick and Joe make horrified eye contact. By unspoken bond, they both take big, brain-freezing sips of their drinks instead of answering.

Patrick’s dad moves on to embarrass other party guests. Pete emerges from the pool and leans wetly against Patrick, throwing a dripping arm over his shoulders. Even with Rayon orange hibiscus print between them, the sloppy contact sends a thrill chasing over Patrick’s skin. Some kind of relapsing-and-remitting fever? He can’t figure out what the hell is going on with him these days. 

Obnoxiously, Pete sticks his fingers into Patrick’s drink and pulls out a wedge of pineapple. He eats it open-mouthed, chewing noisily.

“He’s like a  _ farm animal _ ,” Patrick says to Joe. Joe cackles in agreement. The tequila smarts pleasurably on Patrick’s tongue. If his dad’s going to let him drink tonight, he’s not going to argue. God knows he needs whatever help he can get, dealing with Pete Wentz.

“ _ Moooo _ ,” Pete lows softly against Patrick’s ear. This time, there’s no possible grass allergy to blame for his itchy skin and skipping heartbeat. Oblivious, Pete moves on Joe’s pineapple next.

By the time the sun sets, the boys are back in the pool. Patrick’s on his third margarita. The tiki torches are lit, glowing smeary all around them. Patrick feels light, happy, lifted up. Pete is trying to teach Joe how to do a backfloat and Patrick is chatting with Mrs. Wentz, who’s dangling her feet in the water. He seems to have removed his shirt at some point; his hat’s on backwards.

“So are you having a nice summer, Patrick?” Dale Wentz asks, splashing her feet back and forth.

“I am now,” Patrick says, too earnest too honest.

Mrs. Wentz tilts her head, a twinkle in her eyes exactly like Pete’s. “You seem to be getting along with my boy.”

“No. Absolutely not. Who could,” Patrick says automatically. Luckily, instead of being offended, Pete’s mother just laughs.

“It’s nice having him back in the house, believe it or not. All the younger ones are gone now. I like the cuckoo’s egg better than the empty nest.”

“Are you saying you’re not my real mom?!” Pete hollers from where he’s roughhousing with Joe. Joe shoves Pete’s head under the water. There is much thrashing.

Mrs. Wentz ignores him. “I bet your dad feels the same way,” she tells Patrick. 

“Yeah, uh. I think he likes having me here.”

“He’s so proud of you. He tells us all the time.”

Patrick’s head is a little swimmy. The moon is bright. He feels like he could float, float, float forever. “It’s a little weird that you know so much about me,” he says. He’s a margarita and a half past thinking. Just speaking, now.

Mrs. Wentz raises her eyebrows in a way that could mean anything. “Patrick-from-next-door is a popular topic in my house,” she says.

Patrick has, like, at least 10 follow-up questions. Before he can ask them, Dale leans forward and plucks his drink out of his hand. He’s about to protest when he’s hit by two boys from behind, and dragged into the murky depths.

 

Patrick, Joe, and Pete stretch out on deck loungers, worn out from rough-housing and alcohol sugars. The adults have gone to sleep in their own beds hours past. The stars spin out, far above.

“Ask him,” Joe implores Pete sleepily.

Patrick’s heart is too happy to violently constrict and shut off. Still, it stumbles, a little.

“Not happening, Joseph,” Pete says. He’s got his hands folded on his chest. He looks contemplative this way, like a shirtless poet in repose.

God, he’s pretty in the moonlight.

“Assssk him,” Joe says again, with more whine this time.

“Wait, am I ‘him’?” Patrick asks.

“The one, the only,” says Joe.

“My associate here wants me to ask you to join our band,” Pete explains. “He doesn’t understand the part where you’re literally moving to California in, like, two days. It would be doomed from the start.”

“Not in two days,” Patrick corrects. “Not til the end of the month. So, doomed but just enough.”

Pete lifts his head, something hopeful about him that Patrick can’t read. “And how much of the month are you slumming in Wilmette?”

Patrick bites his lip.  _ Every fucking second, if you ask me to _ , his brain suggests. Patrick ignores his brain, as it is only marginally more trustworthy than his penis. “Might stay through the 18th,” he says with an utterly manufactured air of nonchalance. “My dad’s got this music thing he wants me to go to. But back home, I haven’t even started to pack. So I dunno.”

“Stay,” Pete says. His eyes are soft midnights, dark and swallowing.

Patrick shivers in the warm air. There’s something that happens when you mix Patrick, Pete, and moonlight. He can’t quite believe himself as he says, “Convince me.”

Pete’s gaze flicks to Joe on the lawnchair between them, beginning to snore softly. Patrick cannot miss the movement of his eyes. Everything feels significant. He makes some decision Patrick can only guess at, then rises from his chair. He pads on bare feet to Patrick’s side. He kneels on the stained wood deck. Patrick is aware of how unguarded he is, prone on his back. How defenseless. His breath all but stops.

“Are you convinced?” Pete asks in a whisper.

Patrick can’t speak. He just shakes his head.

Pete leans closer, bowing over him. “Convinced?” he asks again.

Again Patrick shakes his head.

Pete leans til their faces are less than an inch apart, til not even starlight separates them. Patrick is subsumed in the shadow of him. Patrick’s fever is back. His whole body is rigid, his heart turned to solid amber, his ability to breathe a long-forgotten memory. “And now?” Pete whispers. His breath vibrates across the tight, yearning skin of Patrick’s lips.

At that moment, Joe snores so loudly he jerks awake. Pete springs back from Patrick’s lounger like there’re floodlights on them. The U.R.E. straining against Patrick’s double-layer of pants is not so much U. or R. as it is E.

“Did you  _ ask him _ ?” Joe murmurs.

“Yeah,” Pete breathes. He’s rubbing his arms, though it’s not cold. Patrick is still paralyzed, staring, staring, alive with the possibility, with what almost just happened. “He didn’t answer.”

Joe rolls on his lounger, throws an arm across the gap and flops his hand on Patrick’s chest. “Patrick,” he sighs, studying Patrick with only one eye. “Don’t go to college. Stay in Chicago and save our band.” A little drunk and very asleep, he whispers loudly, “ _ Pete’s not a very good singer _ .”

“It’s true,” Pete says mournfully. “I’m not.”

“Maybe sometime you guys will come to California,” Patrick says vaguely. He hates it as soon as he says it. There was a moment here, a beautiful moment, quivering with—with  _ something _ . Then he crushed it with his voice.

It doesn’t matter what Patrick said, really. It just matters that it sounded like  _ no _ .

Joe sighs very pitifully. Pete returns to his own lounger and pats Joe consolingly on the shoulder. “You’re broken his poor drunk heart,” Pete says. His voice is casual, cool. Patrick wonders if the girl on the roof yesterday was convinced, convincing. Patrick closes his eyes to blot out the night because he can’t stand it anymore. Maybe if he lies still, time will forget which way it’s flowing and he’ll get a second chance at conviction.

Patrick imagines Pete leaning over his lounge chair til he falls asleep. He wakes up hours later, sunburnt and with only Joe beside him. If wishes were horses, he supposes, beggars would kiss Pete Wentz.

The thought jolts Patrick the rest of the way awake.

Is  _ that _ what he’s wishing for? Fuck.  _ Does he want to kiss Pete Wentz? _


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Enjoy a queer existential crisis with your breakfast this morning. Thanks for reading, everyone! See you next week!
> 
> [seriously taking recommendations for this playlist, the vibe isn't quite right yet](https://open.spotify.com/user/marvelgirl238/playlist/3gcb1HSwSWvjNb6r5l66Nx)
> 
> Tune in next week for _bedrooms_.

 

Patrick stumbles home with a headache and a sunburn, head gummy with half-remembered, very physical dreams about Pete Wentz.

“Joe. Joe, we’re too white to sleep in the sun,” he tells Joe, shaking the other boy by the shoulder  before he goes. 

Joe slaps his hands away groaning, rolls over. “My people are from Jerusalem,” he mumbles.

Patrick enters his dad’s house in a fugue. He wishes his head wasn’t so blurry. The thoughts jackknifing through his nervous system are bladed and spined. Patrick notices his dad’s keys aren’t on the hook by the front door. That means he has the house to himself, can wallow wherever he wants.

He goes ahead and lays down face-first on the cool tile in the foyer, rolling his hot aching forehead against the floor. He squeezes his eyes til he sees colors burst in his brain. He asks himself,  _ what the hell happened last night _ .

Unfortunately, he remembers everything.

Is it possible. It is  _ possible _ . That Patrick might theoretically have—feelings? For Pete Wentz?

Fuckfuckfuck. The whole thorny, contentious topic of his sexuality was one Patrick was hoping he could just—postpone until San Francisco. Maybe California is far enough away that he can be gay-or-straight-or-whatever-he-needs-to without an audience. Maybe when he lands on that sunny palm-tree soil and sets foot in eternal summer for the very first time, he’ll be utterly transformed. He’ll be someone who can go to music school and play in front of his classmates and not vomit on anyone. He’ll be someone sexy and confident on stage, dancing like Michael Jackson, dressing like David Bowie, singing like Whitney Houston, not giving a shit.  He’ll be someone who understands what’s going on with him, and he’ll be okay with whatever it is.

Patrick’s never had a girlfriend. He’s never wanted one. But it’s not like he’s ever wanted a boyfriend either; the relationships he has with his friends are fulfilling enough. He loves them hungrily, with an intensity and shy possessiveness that has led to rifts in the past. He doesn’t really have any friends back home at this  _ exact _ moment; there was a falling-out. Names were called, words with power that can’t be taken back, once close-minded northern Michiganders hear them. You’d think Patrick was the first person to be called f——- on the whole upper peninsula, like the whole landmass was home only to cishet white folks and their good old-fashioned family values.

Actually, Patrick kind of does think that. That’s why he thinks the state of California will be big enough to give him the space to think it through. In the UP, he’s got two choices, really: just like everyone else, or different. And he’s always been different. What kind of understanding of yourself can you really reach, when you’re in boxes like that? How do you know that everything you think and feel and fear isn’t just—a reaction to that box? How do you know what part is  _ you _ and what part is just what everyone else is expecting?

So fuck you very much, Pete Wentz, for making Patrick deal with this now. On Midwestern soil. With a sunburn. On the floor.

Because miserable as he feels right now, Patrick’s got a hard-on. He’s had it for eight hours straight, probably. Ever since Pete leaned over him in the dark, salt-and-lime rimed lips brushing one against the other as he asked,  _ Convinced? _

Yes, Patrick decides with a jolt. His hips rock the teeniest bit against the floor, testing out the pressurized slide against his cock. Yes, he  _ does _ want to kiss Pete Wentz. He’s not happy about it. He doesn’t know why. But this asshole has been the song stuck in his head since he was 12 years old, clenching up his guts with horror and swooping fear and embarrassment and—fuck—sexual tension. _ Longing _ . And Patrick—Patrick would like to see that through.

Here’s the next problem, though. Patrick rolls onto his back and strokes himself through his swim trunks, enjoying the one part of his body that aches and throbs in a way unrelated to tequila and dehydration. If Patrick wants to kiss Pete—where does Pete stand on the idea of kissing him?

 

Somewhere around the time he’s toweling himself off, wincing at the roughness of fabric on his pink tender skin, Patrick decides to just—ask. He feels better for having drained three glasses of water and washed his hair. He feels strangely  _ clear _ after the existential crisis in his dad’s foyer. He feels annoyed that he’s been wasting so much time, waiting for his life to start without ever letting himself look clearly at what he evens wants his life to be.

It’s July 6th. Summer is burning by. Pete has been a splinter in his skin for six years, and now Patrick has less than two weeks left to maybe, possibly, if he wanted to, kiss him. How much more time does he want to spend, waiting to find out? 

Besides: there are almost no consequences here. It’s not like he’ll be more embarrassed than he already permanently is, if Pete says no. His pride went out the window with the slip’n’slide boner incident of 1996, so the only thing he has to lose is two weeks of making out with a (devastatingly attractive) boy he never has to see again. If Pete says no, Patrick will move away to California and start over again. If Pete says yes, Patrick will kiss him, and then move away to California and start over again.

Imbued with the irreplicable confidence of fatalism, Patrick puts on his favorite t-shirt, his tight jeans with the blown-out knees, a trucker hat, and his stylish black wristband. His hair curls out damp beneath it, feathering like Jim Morrison’s as it dries. He neatened up his sideburns after his shower, and his last orgasm was like, ten minutes ago, so he should be safe from rogue wood for at least, like, another five minutes. He is, in other words, as prepared as he ever will be.

It is in this mindset that he strides purposefully across the lawn and knocks on the white front door of the blue Wentz house. Because respectable adults go to work during the day, it is Pete who answers. Patrick closes his eyes as soon as he sees Pete, before he can notice any details. He doesn’t want to get distracted. He just wants to  _ say it _ .

He barrels heart-first into the confession. “Pete, I came to ask you—”

“Out to lunch? Good timing, I was just about to perish from lack of pancakes.” 

Patrick’s eyes fly open in spite of his resolve. He sputters. Pete’s in a DePaul sweatshirt, hood up, and low-hanging shorts. Patrick can see two striped inches of his briefs rising above the pink pyramid belt. His gaze fixes there like Pete’s hips are magnets. Is Patrick—salivating? Is that actually what’s happening here? No. No. It must be the mention of pancakes.

“You been to Hotcakes yet?” Pete asks. Patrick forces his eyes up to Pete’s face, which is just as dangerous, because that’s where his lips are. Pete’s got eyeliner on and a wide, soft mouth. Patrick can’t believe it was even in question as to whether or not he wanted to kiss that mouth. He feels like he’s being electrocuted, he wants to kiss Pete so badly.

“No, I—” he tries again.

“Great! You gotta drive, my license is suspended again.” Pete pulls car keys out of his pocket and presses them into Patrick’s flustered hand. He steps out the front door, right the fuck into Patrick’s personal space, and pulls the door shut behind him. They’re standing chest-to-chest. 

“Pete, I want to. I want to—”

“Eat pancakes, yes, I know, Patrick. You’re like a broken record. Let’s go already!”

And Pete pushes him towards the shitty Mitsubishi rusting with dignity in the driveway. Pete hops through the open passenger window. Patrick fumbles stupidly with the keys, gets in, starts the car. He’s buckling his seatbelt and he still isn’t quite sure what happened.

He opens his mouth to ask  _ can I kiss  you _ , and Pete twists the volume knob on the stereo all the way up. The Offspring fill the car,  _ loudly _ . The already blown-out speakers buzz with feedback. There’s not enough space to have a thought, let alone a conversation.

“I don’t know how to get there!” Patrick yells over the music.

“Dude, trust me!” Pete yells back.

So Patrick backs out of the driveway, chooses a direction at random, and begins to drive.

Pete gives directions by leaning up close to Patrick’s ear and saying things like  _ left here _ or  _ next right _ . It shouldn’t make Patrick hard, but it does. Wind whips by the open windows and they both sing at the top of their lungs to the better-known tracks off Americana. Some of the pent-up frustration bleeds off Patrick. He feels young. He’s having  _ fun _ .

Right up until the first thing that happens at Hotcakes is Pete flirting egregiously with the young, busty hostess. She’s got red hair and glittery eyeshadow and a little spray of stars tattooed on her brow. Patrick sees the way Pete looks at her. He can’t compete with that.

His ardor wilts in his quivering breast, which is to say: fuck this. Fuck all of it. He’s imagined this whole whirlwind summer romance ‘cause he’s just that bored. He’s the only one here who’s sexually tensed.

Him and his cramping hand.

Their waitress is even prettier. Pete’s eyes flick over her lazily, his smile like slow honey or some other sweet, sticky, lickable thing, and it is too much. Patrick orders the biggest breakfast on the menu because why the fuck not. Pete keeps tangling their feet together under the table, straight-faced like it’s eight consecutive accidents.

“Um, about last night,” Pete says when the silence has stretched on longer than is tolerable. Patrick stares at him sullenly. Even though Patrick came here to talk to him about exactly this topic, suddenly there’s nothing he wants to hear less. This thing he’s discovered about himself, about Pete, felt so precious and potentiated when he first unlocked it. Now, in the blaring Muzak and indoor lighting of this diner, with the walls done in floral yellow and the hot waitress, it feels—stupid. Shameful. Not to be spoken in the light.

Pete starts, “I didn’t mean to—”

“Oh, don’t make me fucking listen to you apologize,” snaps Patrick. Sometimes, he wants to sabotage whatever thing he wants most. Pete goes slack-jawed with surprise at the thick ugliness of Patrick’s voice. The sexy waitress delivers their food into this strained moment.

“Can I get you anything else?” she asks Pete only.

“I think we’re good, thanks.” Pete’s voice is friendly. Patrick’s hands make fists under the table.

“You sure? Nothing on or off the menu that caught your eye?”

Patrick’s gonna puke. “If you guys need to go to the bathroom and fuck this out real quick, I’ll wait,” he says scathingly. He’d be surprised at himself except nothing surprises him today, not after this morning’s stupid gay awakening or whatever it was. (Gay mistakening, maybe.) Pete flushes bright red. The waitress gives Patrick a look of complete disgust and flips him one perfect, manicured middle finger.

“Jesus, Rick,” Pete mutters, sinking low in the booth. “She’s gonna come back and spit in your food.”

“She wanted to come back and spit in your  _ mouth _ ,” Patrick shoots back.

They stare at each other unhappily over plates of food neither has any appetite for anymore, and fuck if Patrick doesn’t still want him. This asshole.

“What is going on with you today?” Pete asks. He pokes his pancakes without enthusiasm.

“You don’t know, like, anything about me. I could always be like this,” Patrick challenges, mostly because it would embarrassing to say the truer thing.  _ I’m mad because I want to kiss you. _

“ _ Are _ you?”

Patrick sighs. He pushes his plate away untouched. “No,” he admits. “I—I saw you on the roof with a girl the other day.” Because why not skip ahead to the real thing that’s bothering him? It’s not like this situation could feel any worse.

Pete, an asshole, waggles his eyebrows. “Oh yeah? Did you enjoy the show?”

“Don’t,” says Patrick shortly. All playfulness drains out of Pete’s expression at once, leaving him looking bleak.

Pete drops his fork. He pulls out his wallet and slaps two twenties on the table. “Let’s get out of here,” he says.

It’s the first time they’ve been in sync all day.

 

This time, Pete turns the stereo off. They listen to the wind and his softly voiced directions. Patrick isn’t great with geography, so he doesn’t realize something’s afoot til Pete directs him into the parking lot for the Gillson Harbor.

“What are we doing here?” Patrick asks.

“Enjoying nature,” Pete says dryly. Then he gets out of the car and starts off towards the docks. Patrick has no choice but to follow. He bobs along compliant in Pete’s wake, an unspoken ceasefire settling between them. They cross a windbreak of ash trees and step onto planked piers. They amble along the jigsaw boardwalk of personally owned aquatic craft, rocking woozily in the murky shallows of diverted Lake Michigan. The water glitters brilliant on sunny days, but today, overcast, it’s uninspiring.

“Lake Superior is—superior,” Patrick says after a while, bending down to dip his fingers in disconcertingly warm water. He flicks lake onto Pete. “It’s clear all the way down, no matter how far out you go, and full of Petoskey stones. So cold it makes your bones hurt, and some summers, the glaciers in the deepest parts don’t even thaw all the way.”

“And is that a metaphor for your interpersonal style?” asks Pete. 

Patrick, affronted, elects not to answer.

“Whatever,” says Pete. “If you hate me so much, stop coming over to my house.”

Patrick wants to protest this, but actually, looking back, for all that he’s claimed to be avoiding Pete, he is the one doing the approaching most of the time. “Should’ve let you bleed out on the curb when you hit the mailbox. Solve this whole problem before it started,” Patrick muses.

“And what problem is that?” asks Pete.

But Patrick is distracted from whatever limp answer he might conjure when Pete, who’s been peering in windows and below tarps very snoopily as they pass boat after boat, abruptly strides up to a particular boat and hops from pier to deck, boarding it.

Patrick reads the side of the boat as he scrambles in after Pete, way less gracefully. “Your family owns a boat called the  _ Tuna Dynasty _ ?” he asks.

Pete is jiggling the locked hatch to the small galley. “What? No. I have no idea who owns this.”

Patrick drops to his belly on the deck in panic, a useless instinct that is unlikely to help him survive any real threat. “Then what the fuck are we doing on it!” he hisses.

Pete grins over his shoulder, the door to the hatch swinging free. Who knew he was a fucking lockpick? “Don’t you ever get bored up on Lake Better-Than-You?”

“Hey, are you Jim’s kid?” a stern voice comes from the pier. The guilty look on Pete’s face makes it clear he’s not. It occurs to Patrick for the first time that Pete might not be a very good liar. Pete might not be very good at disguising his intentions at all. 

A dude in a khaki fishing vest stands on the pier, frowning, hands on  hips. “I’ve already called security,” he says. “So if you  _ are  _ Jim’s kid, find your ID quick. I won’t stand by and let vandals run this town.”

It is the most wealthy suburban white guy thing that has ever been said out loud. Pete grabs Patrick by the arm and hauls him to his feet. “ _ Run _ ,” he hisses in Patrick’s ear.

Patrick barely has time to react. Pete, holding him tightly, takes a running start and leaps wildly off the other side of the boat, the side much further from the pier. Patrick trips through the air spectacularly, and really probably deserves to land in the lake after all his snarky comparisons, but his feet just barely make the edge of the opposite dock. Pete’s grip counterbalances him, gets his center of gravity on the side of solid ground. Khaki Vest hollers, “HEY! YOU STAY RIGHT HERE AND FACE THE CONSEQUENCES OF YOUR ACTIONS!” This is obviously a worthless suggestion, so the boys run, hands clasped between them. They skid across wood planks and leap over coiled ropes and other obstacles, breaking away from the waterfront and cutting through a copse of trees til they find themselves gasping for breath, doubled over laughing, on tennis courts, what feels like half a park away.

Pete wipes tears from his eyes. Something happens to his face when he laughs: it bursts into brightness, his cheeks framing his mouth in a way that is angled and soft at once. It’s fractal sunlight. Patrick stares directly at it and hopes to go blind.

“Never say I don’t get you out of trouble,” Pete laughs.

“ _Out of_ _trouble_? It was trouble _you_ got me into!” Patrick protests. He’s laughing too much to make his case seriously.

“Are you done being mad at me yet?” Pete asks. He reaches for Patrick’s hand again, and Patrick lets him take it. 

“Almost,” Patrick answers thoughtfully. Pete nods, just accepting that Patrick being pissy with him probably makes sense, and pulls him along in some direction that seems premeditated. 

Patrick’s whole heartbeat throbs in his hand, his skin waking up in the places it touches Pete’s. The madness is creeping back in: the kind that makes him want to blurt out the truth. _ I want to kiss you and I think maybe you want to kiss me too _ . 

They come upon a playground just as fat, infrequent raindrops begin to patter down from the overcast sky. Pete gets a look on his face like a hyperactive puppy and starts dragging Patrick towards the play structure faster. “Last one there’s a lava monster!”

Patrick runs in spite of himself. It’s hard to stay grumpy when you’re outside with what amounts to an energetic 3-year-old. He’s laughing again, the sound bubbling up like it’s shaken out of him by his contact with the ground, the joy a natural byproduct of impact. Pete beats him, though: for a short kid, he’s fast as hell. When Patrick ignores his directive (“you can only touch woodchips and orange things, and I can only touch playground equipment”) and starts up the stairs towards the slide, Pete says, “Okay, okay, I’ll be the lava monster.”

Patrick generally ignores him and his exaggerated attempts to grab Patrick’s feet through the bars of the bridge. He climbs higher, gets smacked in the face by a large raindrop, and decides to go for the shelter of the tube slide. He plops himself in the mouth of the slide just as Pete shoves himself inside from the bottom.

“Move, you asshole, I’m coming down!” Patrick protests.

“The slide is  _ orange _ !” Pete insists, still climbing.

Patrick pushes off, sliding for a glorious second before smacking into Pete like a bowling ball. Pete crumples on top of him, and then they’re lying like that inside a tube slide, tangled together with Pete’s laughing head on his chest, Patrick trying like hell to seem annoyed and not exhilarated by the situation. The rain starts drumming harder against the slide, filling the cramped space with sound and vibrations.

“Guess we’d better get cozy,” Pete says, elbowing his way further up Patrick.

“Is this not cozy enough already?” Patrick gripes. He radiates insincerity.

In the dark like this, Pete’s teeth are the brightest light source, glinting with refracted bits of overcast sky from the slide opening. “Oh, do you want me to move?” he asks. He tilts his hip, shifting his weight to one side, in the process rolling very slowly, deliberately, across Patrick’s body. Patrick’s breath catches in his chest so obviously that they both hear it, amplified by the echo chamber of the slide. “Because I’ll move if you want me to move,” Pete murmurs. He rocks his weight back over Patrick’s body. It’s all Patrick can do not to whimper. Pete can definitely feel his dick growing hard. Maybe it’s things with the word  _ slide  _ in it, Patrick thinks distantly, inanely. He is so fucking lost.

Pete nudges Patrick’s nose with his own nose. Patrick’s mouth moves without his permission, trying to catch a kiss. If his brain was getting literally any oxygen at all, he’d be embarrassed.

“What did you want to ask me when you showed up at my house?” Pete whispers.

“What were you gonna apologize for at the diner?” Patrick whispers back.

“You go first.”

“Nuh-uh.”

Pete closes his eyes, swallows so hard Patrick can see his Adam’s apple bob. “I was going to apologize for making you uncomfortable,” he says, and with his eyes closed and his voice pitched so low Patrick has the unshakeable impression of a man praying, “the last time I put you in the exact position I have you in now.”

Something warm and wonderful rushes through Patrick’s veins. He laughs, right in Pete’s face, and Pete’s eyes startle open at the sound. It echoes through the slide, which should be claustrophobic but is wonderful instead. Patrick says, “Okay, I’ll ask my question now.”

And Patrick kisses Pete on the mouth.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> BOYS! KISSING! BOYS!
> 
> Thanks to everyone who's helped resuscitate the vibe on [the Summer Boyfriends playlist](https://open.spotify.com/user/marvelgirl238/playlist/3gcb1HSwSWvjNb6r5l66Nx), and keep the song recs coming!
> 
> See you next Friday for things that happen onstage... and off.

 

Finally, there’s no suspense—no moment of suspension. Pete is kissing back almost before Patrick’s kissed him. With their bodies pressed like this, the kiss isn’t limited to their lips; it spreads epidemic through their whole bodies. Pete’s weight on him is the only thing holding Patrick down to earth. He’s never been kissed like this. Pete presses his thumb on Patrick’s chin, holding his mouth open, his lower lip down, so he can’t quite kiss back. Patrick’s stomach skips and swells, breathless in his guts, his nervous system blowing up. He hungers for Pete’s mouth, squirming against Pete’s body. He fucking starves.

When footsteps thunder from outside, pounding through the whole slide, the kiss breaks on a gasp. Pete breathes hard above him, a particular intensity glossing his face, making Patrick’s heart stutter-stumble in his chest. Is Patrick breathing hard? Is Patrick even  _ breathing _ ?

“Mommy, there’s kids in the slide!” a tiny shrill voice comes from the platform.

Pete’s blissy look splits into his trademarked asshole grin. “Should we defend our ground?” he whispers. “Make a stand here, today, for this slide?”

“We didn’t fight for the boat,” Patrick whispers back. “The slide is all we have left. I’m willing to die for it.”

“You’re too young to die,” Pete says, “and I’m old enough to know better.” He kisses Patrick again, quick and hard and grinning. “Now let’s use this thing like god intended.” He wriggles his hips, layering in more innuendo than Patrick can reasonably be expected to survive, and then slides. He drags Patrick down with him. They spill out of it in a tangle, look up at a disapproving white mom, and for the second time in a brief but life-altering span, they grab onto one another and flee the scene, laughing like wild things.

 

The skies open up before they make it back to the car. Some Midwest rains are light and manageable, drops you can dodge through; this is not that rain. This is a fucking cloudburst. They are soaked to their skins in seconds. Pete is laughing, open-mouthed with raindrops on his tongue. Most people would hurry, if they found themselves caught in the rain; Pete slows down. He spins in it, spreading his arms. He dances.

Patrick can only stare at him. He doesn’t even notice how wide he’s smiling til his cheeks begin to ache.

For the first time, he’s glad he came to Illinois.

 

Pete puts on a mix CD pulled from his glovebox and says, “Let’s just drive.” Patrick has nowhere in particular to be for weeks yet; they could drive all the way to South America if Pete wanted to. He doesn’t know the area and Pete doesn’t give him any more directions, so he turns wherever he feels like and they work on getting lost.

On the console between them, Pete strokes Patrick’s damp hand. Patrick gets goosebumps.

 

That night, Patrick dreams of a grin in the dark, a hard messy kiss.

He wakes happy.

 

He would never admit it, but he’s expecting Pete to show up the next morning, maybe to demand something impetuous that Patrick can pretend to be grumpy about, like a forced donuts-and-coffee expedition. He’d never admit it, but as the morning wicks away into the afternoon and he bounces around his dad’s house wasted and restless, he starts to feel—well, a little rejected.

In the afternoon, he goes to Pete’s house. Stupid to feel rejected and never give anyone a chance to properly reject you, isn’t it? Thus: he fidgets on the Wentz doorstep. He rings the bell. He waits.

There is no answer.

_ Casually _ and  _ with no agenda  _ he gets on his dad’s bike. He just wants some fresh air and sunshine on this very humid 90 degree day, that’s all. He only coincidentally happens to ride past Joe’s house. The garage is closed, though. No sign of Pete anywhere.  _ Not that he’s looking _ .

Back on the Wentz doorstep a few hours later, ringing the bell again. Did he imagine yesterday? He brushes his own lips and shivers. His skin feels so full it could burst. No answer at the door, so he kind of… takes a stroll around the house. He’s curious is all. Stretching his legs. He lets himself in the back gate. He’s just curious, really, what the inside of the Wentz house looks like. That’s the only reason he looks in the sliding glass door. It’s not his fault it’s unlocked, is it?

The sweat on Patrick’s skin exhales as he collides with the crisp AC. He’s standing in Pete’s house. No one has invited him to be here, but here he is.

He takes off his shoes, vaguely feeling that he does not wish to be rude although he is very clearly breaking and entering. He creeps on sock feet through the Wentz house. He does not admit it to himself, but he flies true as an arrow towards where he thinks Pete’s room will be, based on the window that expelled him the other day.

The room is empty, but he knows it’s Pete’s just the same. Twin beds, Star Wars bedspread, crooked posters, shelves crowded with books and children’s toys. His bass leans in one corner, swaddled in dirty laundry. The room smells like sweat and the shaving cream Pete uses. Patrick touches his lips again, feeling a little faint.

Then he looks out the window and into his own bedroom.

Patrick sits down heavily on one of the beds, his legs giving up before his brain has really processed what he’s seeing. Pete has a  _ clear _ view into Patrick’s bedroom from here. A clear view of the top bunk. A clear view of any boys in the top bunk and all the things they might do there.

“Fuck,” he says under his breath. He says it with such heart.

Everything gets worse when a voice from the doorway says, “A Patrick in my bed? Wishes really do come true.”

Patrick scrambles to his feet, turns to face Pete. Pete is pink-flushed, wet with sweat, his hair a damp salty mess. He’s in athletic shorts and no shirt at all, the long white cord of headphones around his neck. Patrick cannot unsee the ink and metal and scar woven into his skin. His hipbones jut, his abs glisten. The whole visage is—arresting. A sound escapes Patrick’s lips without his permission. He hopes very much it doesn’t sound like a moan. 

“I was out for a run,” Pete says, but Patrick is breathing much harder than he is. “Patrick, not that I’m complaining, but why are you in my house?”

“You can see into my bedroom,” Patrick says, as if this answers the question.

Pete goes over to the window in question and peers through. “Huh,” he says, but his tone of surprise is strangled and utterly unconvincing.

“You’ve been watching me!” Patrick accuses.

Pete whirls to face him, cheeks burning red. “Have not!” he lies. He sinks to the bed beside Patrick, burying his face in his sweaty hands. He smells like the heat of muscles moving. Patrick feels the unaccountable urge to lick his bare shoulder. “I’ve only been watching you a little,” Pete mumbles into his hands.

Patrick does not ask  _ and what have you seen me do _ . He knows already he won’t survive the answer. Instead of being embarrassed, he chooses to follow the swooping dive in the pit of his belly, the thrill at knowing he’s been on Pete’s mind, been in Pete’s eye. He leans into the gravitational pull. He kisses Pete on the shining brow.

Pete peeks at him, looking out the side of his hands. Patrick licks his own lip to taste Pete’s salt. “I am very disturbed by this invasion of privacy,” Patrick says gravely. “You’ll have to work very hard to make it up to me.”

This, at last, seems to be invitation enough. Pete springs at him, because he doesn’t kiss gentle—he’s either avoiding Patrick’s lips like the wrong end of a magnet or bowling Patrick over with his whole body—and knocks their jaws together before his mouth finds Patrick’s, huge and hungry. Pete kisses him down onto the mattress before Patrick’s body has even really registered the impact. Patrick goes boneless, his spine melted and his muscles turned to honey, his stomach curling and itching, his guts squirming excited at Pete’s touch. It is all he can do to hang on, his hands closing around Pete’s bare elbows, and kiss back. He feels intangible, like he could sink through this bed and keep falling forever, through and through and through the earth, except that Pete’s lips are a fishhook through him, spearing him to the deepest part of his guts, holding him so urgently  _ here _ —

“You singing for me?” Pete breaks the kiss to mumble against Patrick’s mouth. It’s not til he says this that Patrick realizes he’s been humming, a thick moan of almost-music that starts in his chest and resonates through him. The back of his throat tastes like gold.

“You’re making me into music,” Patrick says insensibly, his lids heavy and low. He lets his hands find Pete’s back, damp and bare, all shifting bone and lean muscle in between, the soft spill of padded hips. His breath catches in his throat at the wealth of it, all this skin, whole continents of Pete bared to him.

Pete makes a sound in answer, not an especially human one, and kisses Patrick harder, more urgently than before. “God, you’re—” Pete tries to say between hard, driving kisses. “You’re— You’re.”

Patrick never finds out what he is. They make out with blind desperation, with the newness of each other’s skins, in the rolling golden sunlight. Pete’s hands are stroking the skin under Patrick’s shirt, their mouths swollen and oversensitive, Patrick permanently out of breath, when the far-off grind of the garage door opening announces that at least one parental Wentz is home.

Pete kisses Patrick on the underside of his chin, a place on his skin Patrick doesn’t think anyone has ever touched. Then Pete climbs off of him, his running shorts hiding nothing: not the bulge of his hard dick, not the wet spot of his excitement. “Fuck, I’m shaky,” he says. Patrick is effectively dead of how it feels to have made Pete Wentz shaky. Patrick is an overcooked spaghetti noodle. At some point or another, Patrick came in his pants.

“I’m gonna shower,” Pete tells him. “Then we’ve got this house show over in Cicero. You’re coming.”

“I’m kind of a mess,” Patrick says. It’s the first coherent sentence he’s gotten out in a while.

“Well, if you want,” Pete says, with a slow and wicked grin, “you can shower too.”

He lets his shorts drop to the ground in the doorway. Patrick watches his ass disappear down the hall. He doesn’t think he’ll ever move again.

 

Patrick regains voluntary motor control at some point. The sound of Mrs. Wentz puttering around downstairs pretty much rules out the ‘Pete in the shower’ option for him, which is possibly good, because he would probably forget to breathe in there. Not that he’s going to be able to stop thinking about the invitation, or regret not taking it, like,  _ ever _ . He tries to creep out of the house undetected, as he entered it, but Mrs. Wentz catches him at the back door. He holds his sneakers in front of his crotch, hoping she doesn’t notice the embarrassing stain.

“Oh, hello, Patrick!” she says brightly. “I was just going to start dinner. Do you want to stay for stroganoff?”

It is the most unbearably suburban thing that has ever happened to him. He shifts awkwardly, his eyes cutting to the sliding glass doors, his escape route. “Uh,” he says. “Uh. I was heading—home.”

“Are you going out with Pete tonight, dear? We don’t go to many of his shows, but he’s very talented. You should see him play.” She’s beaming at Patrick. Patrick has no idea what the right fucking response is to anything in his life right now.

“Yes?” he says. He hadn’t decided, exactly, what his plan was after  _ put on clean pants, and more deodorant _ , but it’s not like he was going to say no to anything Pete asked him.

“Just try not to fall in love with him! He’s got quite the stage presence,” Mrs. Wentz says next, horribly. 

Patrick feels like she can see straight through him: through his shoes, through his clothes, through his sticky groin, right to his rabbiting heart and whatever meaty truths it might contain. “Fall in love?” Patrick chokes. What does this woman think she knows about him? Oh, god, is she  _ right _ ? Is that what he’s doing? Is that why he’s been obsessed with Pete Wentz for, well,  _ years _ ?

“The next thing I’m gonna fall in love with is California,” Patrick blurts dumbly. Mrs. Wentz’s sunny smile doesn’t waver, but Patrick is sweating like he’s being interrogated. He definitely needs seconds and thirds of deodorant. 

“Come back if you change your mind about dinner!” she calls after him. Patrick, who is on the verge of blacking out with horror and embarrassment, all but runs out the back door. When he gets back to his dad’s house, he deadbolts the door behind him. He has the vague sense that the extra lock will keep some deep, existential horror at bay. It will at the very least keep Pete Wentz at bay, he thinks.

But that’s a lie too, of course: because there’s not a version of Patrick in any reality that doesn’t open the door and let Pete in.

 

He jerks off in front of the window on purpose, this time. It’s hotter, knowing Pete could be watching.

 

Sometime between making out with Pete for an hour in his bedroom and changing into less sweaty clothes that he hopes are appropriate for a hardcore show, Patrick’s stomach begins to shrivel with self-doubt. Here he is, a directionless kid on this grand journey of sexual awakening—and here’s Pete, make-out king, who was fooling around with a girl on his roof just a few days ago. It doesn’t  _ mean _ anything, Patrick tells his fluttery heart sternly. It’s not like there’s anything he can offer Pete. Pete’s probably got his pick of clumsy virgins. He can pick less sweaty ones, ones without weird sideburns. He wants Pete and it scares him. Something poison in his gut flexes. The only thing better than getting what you want is ruining it forever.

“Get in the van, Tricky Rick!” Pete greets him when Patrick does, of course, unlock the door. There’s a shitty white van idling at the curb. Andy waves from the passenger window.

Patrick wavers in the doorway and tries to think his way out of this. He doesn’t like the idea of being stranded somewhere in lesser Chicago without a ride of his own. What he really needs to be working on are some demos for his freshman portfolio, he decides. It would be irresponsible  _ not _ to do schoolwork on this humid evening in July. 

Pete’s excited shine oxidizes, losing luster under the effect of Patrick’s hesitation. “Hey,” he says. “How soon are you leaving town?”

Patrick closes his eyes and counts. “Two weeks-ish,” he says. Precision is key.

“So there’s no time to waste,” Pete says. Then, in front of the guys in the car and possibly Patrick’s dad in the house and anyone else in the fucking neighborhood who might be watching, Pete leans in and kisses Patrick on the jaw. He grabs Patrick’s hand while Patrick is reeling from the concussive blast of that kiss and tugs him out of the house. “C’mon, Charming. Your carriage awaits.”

Patrick is climbing into the van before he even really knows what’s happening. Which really sums up the whole Pete Wentz experience, doesn’t it?

 

He hangs at the back of the crowd. That’s kind of his move. He doesn’t know the words, doesn’t love crowds, feels sweaty and out of place. His belly feels weird, watching Pete up there. He’s jealous of the kids who press against the stage, especially when Pete reaches out and touches their hands like benediction. Pete’s all teeth up there, all noise, all violent compression, all release. The basement room is bathed in red lights someone’s set up and shadows. The smell of bodies and booze cramps in as close as the crowd. Nervously, Patrick thinks they’re probably in violation of the fire code. But the adrenaline does something to his heartbeat. At first, it all just feels like anxiety: clawing and unpleasant, thrumming like jet fuel in his veins, sick and poison. But the longer the set goes on, the more the crowd’s energy opens up and knits together into something larger and keener than its individual parts, the more the jagged spikiness of him clarifies. He thinks he’s—excited. Hardcore shows in crowded, underage basements are not his usual scene, but he’s never felt like this in a jazz club. He’s never felt like  _ this _ anywhere, before. The memory of Pete’s mouth burns on him til he expects those spots to glow neon, strobing in the low light. His fingertips itch as if with lightning. His gut twists and he’s afraid of what he feels, because it’s like—it’s like wanting to be  _ up there _ . Wanting to do what Pete and his friends are doing. Wanting to do the thing that’s always scared Patrick the most.

Almost exactly like he can read the worst part of Patrick’s mind, the seedy underbelly of his idle thoughts, Pete shoves a sweaty sheaf of black hair out of his eyes and breathes hard into the microphone. He lets his lips press against it in a way that makes Patrick want to swallow the piece of sound equipment whole. “We’ve got a treat for you tonight,” Pete pants into the mic. Patrick’s bloodflow instantly redirects to his groin. “Is there a Patrick Stump in the house? Patrick? Everybody clear a path for that golden kid trying to bury himself in shadows back there.” Pete points, and it’s like an arrow in Patrick’s heart. The small crowd turns, so many eyes on him that Patrick feels like he’s going to buckle inward like a tin can at the bottom of the sea.

“C’mon,” Pete urges into the mic. “Come to me. I’m on a rope, bud,  you’ve gotta come to me.”

Like he’s in some kind of trance, Patrick’s feet carry him towards the stage. It goes against every screaming instinct of self-preservation to do it, but god, he’s tired of his meager coward’s life. He reminds himself that he’s the boy who’s running away to California. He reminds himself that he’s the boy Pete Wentz held by the hips today, licking into his neck like he could expose the nerves there. He forgets a moment why he’d ever want to hit the brakes.

Patrick floats through the crowd. Pete reaches a  hand down, and pulls Patrick up onto the 2-foot stage. His grin looks bloody in the low red light. His eyes are endless. Patrick’s skin feels overstuffed, oversensitive. He’s trembling, only not like he’s scared. He takes a deep, upending breath. He’s on a stage.

“Ready?” Pete asks. His voice is low and torn, reverberating around the brick-walled basement through the amps and speakers.

Patrick nods, his heart too large in his mouth to speak, and doesn’t care what he’s agreeing to. He’s ready for anything Pete wants from him.

Then Andy counts off on his sticks and drops into the dirty beat of  _ Beat It _ . Joe jumps in a few measures later with a thick, grunge-humming riff. Pete leans into the mic and Patrick leans to meet him, every inch of him a nerve ending. The crowd claps and screams. Patrick closes his eyes, lets himself sing.


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> HAPPY FRIDAY, my babes! It's glorious out here, and we all need some summer to rub against our skins. Enjoy some [summer make-out jams](https://open.spotify.com/user/marvelgirl238/playlist/3gcb1HSwSWvjNb6r5l66Nx), read about some summer smoochin', and get ready to cringe.
> 
> Next week: the Schemes of Joe Trohman.

 

Patrick is vibrating punch-drunk in his own skin, so Pete helps him unzip it. 

Being on stage was like. Performing with his friends was like. Singing for a small crowd bobbing and singing back was like.

Language fails him. He doesn’t know what it’s like, because he’s never done this before.

He knows only that he wants to do it again.

In the car after, Pete holds his hand. There are worlds tucked in Pete’s skin and their undertow sucks at Patrick, dizzy like vertigo. Patrick uses the places Pete’s skin touches his like stars to chart his heart by. Pete’s fingerpads are the rough underside of velvet. Patrick sails.

This is not something they need words to negotiate. Magnetic heartbeats press together, linking them tight through the thinnest skin. Patrick has never been so high in his life. He’s blind-deaf-dumb on stage lights, smoke, the echo of people chanting back. He feels like the vessel of something greater than himself. Pete makes him want to spill.

Joe drops them off and they don’t have anyplace to go to be alone, so they park across the street under the open sky will have to do. They stumble up the hill, their faces locked together, mouthteethtonguesoftsharpsuck, and there’s no air in the universe and Patrick wouldn’t need it if there was. He is spinning, swimming, burning up under this touch. The grass is cool on his bare back, which is when he notices Pete’s stripped off his sweaty t-shirt. Pete straddles Patrick’s hips, rearing above him wicked in the night, and Patrick is lost. Pete shucks off his own shirt and collapses down on top of Patrick, inevitable, inevitable. They kiss like gravity. They don’t stop there.

 

It’s the first time Patrick has ever come with another person.

He never knew he was starved for so much.

 

They lay silver and heaving under that ridiculous-full July moon, on their backs in disarray, pants skewed sideways, sticky-palmed. Patrick’s shirt is somewhere out of sight further down the little hill. Pete pillows his head on one hand, uses the other to trace curious patterns across Patrick’s ribs, in tightening circles around Patrick’s nipples. If they could just exist like this, Patrick thinks. Kissed into bliss beneath the moon. He doesn’t have to think about anything, when they’re like this. He and Pete can just wear their quicksilver skins and slip through the night, steal anything they hunger for, lead one another to what they need.

Pete licks Patrick off his fingers idly, and if Patrick hadn’t floated up and out of his body already, his heart would stop.

“Hey Pete?” he manages to say.

“Yeah, Trick?” Pete asks, sexy and slow, his eyes dazzled and faraway.

“I like you too.”

 

Patrick stumbles in sometime past midnight, tripping on air. He’s just bliss and nerve endings bundled up in skin. No thoughts, no bones. He can’t stop smiling, open-mouthed and dopey. His cheeks glow with a possibly permanent flush.

The TV is on in the living room. His dad is eating Fruit Loops in front of Moulin Rouge. Suddenly bashful, Patrick bites his lips, trying to fold in his telling smile.

“Hey, Patster,” his dad says, a hair too casually. “Sit down a minute, bud.”

Patrick’s brain is moving too slowly to read the danger cues or take evasive maneuvers. He’s too distracted by the low, pleasurable aftershocks clenching through his thighs and belly. He drifts over to the leather ottoman and sinks into it.

“I was chatting with the dean of the music college today,” his dad says. Patrick is blinking as if through molasses, sweet and slow. He’s comprehending only every 6th word spoken to him. He is the living embodiment of the phrase  _ sensory memory _ . “I mentioned you, and she made the comment that she’d never heard you play.”

“Okay?” says Patrick distractedly, and then a beat later realizes why this is a problem. He stayed with his dad last October for his Northwestern audition. He went to it, he did. His dad dropped him off outside the building and he went in. He went in, began to panic, threw up in a hallway trash can, and then hid there until his dad returned to pick him up. At which time he looked his father in the face and said,  _ I think it went really well _ .

Rather too late to be convincing, Patrick adds, “I don’t think she was there. The day I auditioned. It was for, um, a committee.”

“Oh, a committee? Do you happen to remember any of their names?”

Patrick shrugs, casting his gaze desperately around the room in search of some kind of plausible distraction. Right now all he’s distracted by is the swooping in his stomach and the throb between his legs. “Ehhh,” he says noncommittally.

“Maybe your memory is a little foggy,” his dad says reasonably. “It was several months ago. Here’s a refresher: Dean Montgomery says  _ you never showed up _ .”

Patrick’s stomach drops out, but it’s still just because he’s thinking about Pete Wentz. His world has collapsed to the throbbing imprints of someone else’s touch, like his skin’s always been under a thick curtain and Pete’s the first thing that’s ever really touched him.

“Patrick, I drove you to that audition personally! Toni-Marie is a  _ friend of mine _ . Will you at least attempt to explain yourself?” No trace of Cool Dad remains. Patrick’s dad is pink-cheeked and a little quivery. Patrick hopes this isn’t what _ he _ looks like when he’s upset.

“Don’t act like you get to parent me all of a sudden,” Patrick mutters. He fixes his eyes on Nicole Kidman, who is coughing her lungs out on mute. It is no less tragic for being silent, unlike Patrick, the tragedy of whom seems to increase exponentially every time he opens his damn mouth. 

“That,” Patrick’s dad says, “is ungracious.”

“But not inaccurate, right?” Patrick asks. Anger, anger he can do. Anger is warm like blood rushing, tense like hands touching, surging like lips brushing. He doesn’t know how to tell his dad, the professional musician, that he gets stage fright. He doesn’t know how to tell the man who’s paying for his expensive music college that he has no idea how he’s ever going to be able to actually  _ do _ the job he so desperately wants training in. The only thing Patrick has ever wanted to do in his life is make music. How fucking embarrassing is it, that he can’t do it in front of other people?

“I just don’t understand what happened,” Patrick’s dad says. “If you didn’t want to go to Northwestern, Patrick, you could have just  _ told  _ me.”

At last, an excuse presents itself. Patrick seizes upon it like a life preserver, doesn’t care if it’s hurtful or untrue. He just wants this conversation to end so he can go back to basking in the aftershocks still jutting through him. “Well, I’m telling you now,” he says. “I don’t want to go to your shitty school.”

Patrick waits to see every last bit of his dad’s face fall, jaw out, fists balled tight. When he’s sure the blow has landed at maximum devastation, he pushes himself off the ottoman and marches upstairs. He does not spare a single glance behind him.

 

Patrick leaves his dad’s house the next morning and doesn’t really care if he ever goes back. It’s Pete he wants to see, Pete’s he burning up with, but Pete’s car isn’t parked outside the Wentzes’ house. Something catches in his guts at that, since he knows Pete can’t drive himself. It’s ridiculous—he doesn’t live here, they barely know each other—but wondering who could be driving Pete around makes him feel skittish and cramped. He heads for Joe’s house instead.

He’s awkward on the doorstep, not sure how to explain his presence to this boy he barely knows. But it turns out he doesn’t need to. Joe answers the door in a zip hoodie, hanging open over his bare torso, and boxer shorts. He yawns in Patrick’s face. It’s going on 11am. “Just the man I wanted to see!” says Joe. He ushers Patrick inside and, without asking, pours them both giant bowls of fruit-flavored cereal.

While they eat, Joe says, “So you’re probably wondering why I asked you to meet with me today.”

“You didn’t? I showed up uninvited at an indecent hour.”

“I want you to write a song for us,” Joe carries on like Patrick hasn’t spoken. “Our band—well, we have a lot of enthusiasm, Patrick. But so did Full English Breakfast, and look what happened to them.”

Joe’s looking off wistfully into the middle distance. Patrick feels like he’s interrupting some kind of sea captain monologue. “You’ve never even heard my work,” Patrick points out. “I might suck worse than you guys.”

Joe’s mouth drops open in mock astonishment. A piece of cereal falls out. “Wait, you’re saying you didn’t write  _ Beat It _ ? I thought that was an original P. Stump composition.” Then he laughs, wipes his mouth gracelessly on his bare arm, and says, “Dude, I know you’re good, okay? I’ve met your dad. He talks about it. He  _ only _ talks about it.”

That makes Patrick’s guts feel wormy, so he takes a big gulp of milk out of his cereal bowl to get out of looking at Joe. 

“C’mon,” Joe says. He grabs a shirt off the back of a chair and points down a dark staircase leading out of the kitchen. “Basement.”

Patrick experiences the particular hesitation associated with dark staircases leading to unknowns. “Oh my god, Patrick, I’m almost definitely not gonna murder you,” Joe calls over his shoulder as he sails down the stairs. “Let’s go!”

In the basement, Joe flops on a grey overstuffed couch and gives Patrick an acoustic guitar. “Play something,” he instructs. Feeling his face go pink and pinker, Patrick starts picking out a T. Rex song with shaky fingers. Joe’s into it, nodding along, up until he recognizes the melody. “Something of  _ yours _ ,” Joe corrects. “Or something for my shitty band to steal.”

But Patrick’s sweating. His chest feels tight, like every breath he pushes against it makes the sinews lacing him shut shrivel and shrink. He’s not getting enough air. Joe’s eyes on Patrick and Patrick’s fingers on the strings is a bad combo. He needs Pete, he thinks. He needs Pete in near enough proximity that he gets that drunk-reckless feeling, the feeling where his dick has more say than his brain, where he’s too horny to be properly anxious. Where the chance that Pete will touch him while he plays burns so bright in his field of potential vision that all the embarrassments and humiliations that usually populate his predictions get ashed out. Pete’s his magic feather, Patrick thinks, sweaty and lurchingly nauseous with Joe’s eyes on him. With Pete nearby, maybe he could even have played his auditions.

“I don’t know you that well,” Patrick says, because he needs an excuse for why there’s no sound coming out of his paralyzed fingers and insulting Joe is the most efficient thing he can think of. “No offense, but. I’m pretty private about my work. No leaks, you know.”

Joe regards him through narrowed eyes. “We’re not actually going to steal your songs and get famous off them, Patrick,” he says, his voice tight like this should be obvious. 

Patrick fusses with tuning the guitar to avoid looking at the other boy. “Well, you know. Gotta be careful about—melody contagion.” He shrugs one shoulder elaborately, like this is a real thing that musicians worry about, like he’s being an  _ artist _ and not just an asshole.

Joe’s facial expression has taken a sharp veer towards annoyance. He’s opened his mouth, a waspish look about his eyes, when they’re interrupted by footsteps clomping down the basement stairs. Pete emerges sneakers, knees, waist, chest, grin into the cement-walled basement. “No one answered the door,” he says by way of greeting.

“So you what? Let yourself in?” Joe gripes.

Pete waggles his eyebrows in Patrick’s direction. “It’s a trick I learned from someone,” he says, and it’s so sexy that Patrick could come right now, probably, if his groin was hit with a strong breeze. Even a moderate breeze would do.

“You’re just in time to hear about how Patrick’s too good for us,” Joe tells him.

Pete doesn’t even blink. “Patrick  _ is _ too good for us. Tricky Rick, don’t let Joe pry your songs out of you. He’s just trying to use you to get famous.”

Joe sputters in protest. “I’m trying to use him to get even  _ one  _ good song for our band, for your information! If we happen to get famous from that, well, I can’t see the future, can I? I’m not a  _ fortune teller _ , Peter.”

“I don’t think fortune tellers can see the future either. Technically,” Patrick points out.

Pete looks affronted. “Uh, Professor Trelawney, hello? Do you even  _ read  _ Harry Potter?”

Briefly, Patrick wonders why he ever tried so hard to make Pete think he was cool. Then he wonders how Pete makes being a dork seem so cool, and goes right back to feeling  _ way  _ out of his league.

Joe snaps his fingers. “Hey! Nerds! We’re talking about the future of my band here.”

“Thought you  _ weren’t _ seeing the future?” Patrick says, smiling in spite of his efforts to seem like a Serious Musician. Dizziness arrived with Pete, dizziness and memories of stage-sweat and quick, sloppy orgasm, and his fingers are traipsing silent over guitar strings in the shape of one of his songs. Brave or else stupid. Pete redirects his blood flow.

Softly, Patrick starts to strum, letting his song breathe into the audible air. He’s instantly sweaty, a problem made worse by the rapid turn of his friends’ heads as they orient to the sound. He doesn’t have any songs that sound like what these guys play, but he tries to modify as he goes, punching up the tempo, going dirty on the chords. He closes his eyes, hoping it will help, but being looked at is something he can  _ feel _ . 

“Are there words?” Joe asks, after Patrick has played through the intro, the verse, and the bridge. There are words, but Patrick’s too sweaty to sing them. He bites his lip, starts in on the chorus. Then he feels a hand on his shoulder; he’s so startled his eyes fly open. Pete’s there, right there, watching him with tilted head, lifted chin, soft-lidded, measuring eyes. Soft, shaken, really not in control of his mouth anymore, Patrick sings, “Last night, I saw my world explode, yeah.” Pete’s mouth snags in a smile. He looks directly back into Patrick’s eyes and sings along: “Last night, I saw my world explode.”

 

After Joe’s, they walk, the unrepentant July sun blasting the back of Patrick’s neck. Sweat runs down between his shoulder blades. The air shimmers with heat. The whole world is the same temperature as the inside of Patrick’s body. It makes him feel like he’s swimming: lush, a sense of spilling. Summer doesn’t feel like this in Michigan. 

He’s pretty sure he used to have thoughts, a whole brain full of them; now, all he is is this single-file line of consciousness, all the nerves in his body crowding overfull into the part of his skin that’s closest to Pete. Pretty soon molecules are going to start making the leap, just detaching from Patrick and floating across the inches of space to where Pete moves, lithe-limbed and golden, walking beside him. Patrick wants Pete to touch him again. Patrick  _ needs _ Pete to touch him again. He needs proof that what happened last night was more, better, than just a dream. He won’t remember til they’re skin-to-skin.

He keeps swaying and weaving into Pete’s space, hoping to cause a collision. He swings his hand awkwardly far out from his side, hoping Pete might grab it. But Pete’s chattering blissfully on about rumors he’s heard about the next Harry Potter book and when it will be released. He doesn’t seem to notice Patrick’s whimpering, aching skin. And Patrick can’t just  _ ask _ . God forbid he ever be bold for a single moment in his entire life. He’d sooner float off the earth and die of asphyxiation somewhere in space than mention how badly he needs Pete to anchor him.

The closer they get to their houses, the larger Patrick’s conviction that Pete isn’t going to touch him at all looms in him. He can’t just go back to his dad’s without the brand of Pete’s fingerprints burned into his memory. He casts through his thick, syrupy thoughts, trying to get his stumbling tongue to ask for something, anything, that will keep Pete beside him a few moments more.

It’s not til the Wentz house is in view that he thinks of something. “Hey, have you ever seen my dad’s recording studio?” he blurts out. “It’s in the basement. It’s pretty cool.”

Pete’s eyes are bright, curious. Easy as anything, he says, “Wanna show me? I’ve got nothing going on today. I kind of wanted to spend it with you.”

 

The recording studio is easily the best thing about Patrick’s dad’s house. Cool, dark, and underground, it’s all leather chairs, sleek switchboards set into mahogany, soundproof glass, and microphones so expensive Patrick would normally be nervous just handling the box they came in. He leads Pete in bold as belonging, though. Pete trails his fingers along the outside of the glass, leaving streaks Patrick can already tell he’ll be tempted to lick later. Pete is a living temptation, feels like. 

“Ta-da,” Patrick says as the door snugs shut behind them. “Soundproof.”

Pete’s eyebrow jumps. “How soundproof?”

Patrick opens his mouth to say  _ very _ just as Pete lets out a sharp, sudden scream. Patrick about jumps out of his skin. He smacks Pete’s arm, scowling, and Pete shows a fangy smile. “So what do you do down here, Rick? Where no one can hear you?”

Pete angles towards Patrick, cutting into his space like closing in for the kill. Patrick’s heart surges up into his jugular, groin tightening by instinct. From deep within Patrick’s space, he murmurs, “Given what you do in front of open windows? Down here I bet you get  _ loud _ .”

Patrick shivers, his whole body rippling with imagined impact. He wants Pete to touch him more than anything. He swallows hard, closes his eyes for courage and says, “Why don’t you find out?”

His eyes are still closed when Pete kisses him. He feels the back of Pete’s hand brush his chin and he  _ does _ make a sound, a little scrape of an inhale that disappears into the insistent pressure of Pete’s lips. That fast, he loses himself. Every scrap of self-consciousness, every inhibition, is gone; he’s half-hard already and not embarrassed by it. He angles his hips, pressing his dick against Pete’s leg. What’s the point of stage fright, he wonders, licking his way into Pete’s mouth? Why did he ever have a single reservation?

Here in the artificial cold, everything but Patrick’s heart forgets it’s summer. He moves for Pete like an animal trying to keep warm. He hooks Pete’s belt with his thumbs, pulls Pete into him, presses himself harder against Pete’s leg. Pete says “Fuck” against Patrick’s lips and kisses harder, holding the back of Patrick’s head in strong fingers, parting Patrick all the way down with his tongue. Patrick rolls his hips, rubbing his dick over Pete’s hipbone, having by this point completely lost his mind. Sensation, nerve ending, spark: that’s it for him. This is it.

Pete’s fingers dig at Patrick’s waist, sinking into soft flesh, scrabbling with brass zipper and button. Patrick’s pants come undone under Pete’s hurried hands. “Let me, let me,” Pete pleads into Patrick’s mouth, sinking towards his knees.

Pete’s nose slides down Patrick’s belly, his hands tugging Patrick’s pants and boxers down. Patrick has the distant awareness that he should stop this, that this is fast, that this is one of the last first times he’s ever gonna get, he should—

Pete is nuzzling his bare thigh and the only thing he’s aware of is that.

Pete’s cheek brushes soft against Patrick’s aching cock and Pete looks up at Patrick from that vantage. His mouth is obscured, but Patrick  _ feels _ the smile spread across his most sensitive skin, and he doesn’t try to muffle the groan that tears up his throat. Soundproof, right? Pete turns his head just enough that his lips graze Patrick’s swollen dick and says, “Pull my hair.”

It’s so fucking sexy Patrick jolts from the spine, the motion of his hips making his dick bump against Pete’s skin. Patrick lives and dies within that feeling. He wraps a careful hand around Pete’s long bangs, filling his fist with thick strands, and Pete jerks his head against the ginger grip. “ _ Pull _ ,” he repeats, his voice low and grating. His lips brush Patrick’s skin like zooming in: the cool warm wet of Pete’s mouth, the hard slick of Pete’s teeth, the gut-knotting hum of Pete’s voice. Patrick pulls. Pete mouths roughly over Patrick’s groin, Patrick’s inner thighs and hip creases, Patrick’s red-gold pubic hair, Patrick’s dick Patrick’s dick Patrick’s  _ dick _ .

Patrick pulls harder and Pete’s tongue flicks out of his mouth, swiping the length of Patrick, and he’s never felt anything like this before. He’s never done anything like this before. He is a quivering mass of grateful collapsing, all nerves and no brain cells. He lets out an involuntary, full-throated cry when Pete fits his mouth sloppily around Patrick, sucking him down into his throat. Patrick is wet-slick-slide- _ pressure _ , the imprint of Pete’s fingertips in Patrick’s pale thighs, Pete’s hair coarse in his hand, the slow movement of Pete’s head paired with the wet, uncareful popping and lapping of Pete’s mouth—Patrick is this, this, this, there is nothing else in the world but this, and he’s not going to last two minutes in Pete’s mouth because this feeling, this moment, is from a time before want, before language, before being, this is straight from the primordial fucking cosmos, you just can’t invent this shit, you can’t imagine it, you can’t contain it in words muscles skin. Pete’s mouth is the crushing salt tide and Patrick, Patrick is swept away.

Patrick’s fingers knot in Pete’s hair, finding the rhythm. He pulls back on Pete’s hair and pushes forward with his hips; Pete presses Patrick’s hips back with the thrust of his chin and Patrick palms Pete’s head against him. They unite in momentum. Pete is moaning, vibrating around Patrick’s dick. Patrick is making sounds that do not bear description.

“Gonna—gonna—okay if I come?” Patrick pants out. He wants to watch what Pete’s doing, the dark head bobbing, his fingers white and tight around Pete’s hair, the slick flash of pink flesh and Pete’s wet lips, but his eyes keep rolling back at the intensity of the sensation. 

“S’the point,” Pete gasps back, and it’s so wet in his mouth, and his tongue wraps and slides around Patrick’s shaft, and Patrick’s whole body is starting to shudder, and this is it, this is the high point of his entire life, and once he wrecks himself on this boy’s mouth, he gets to learn how to make Pete come next—

Patrick comes like cataclysm. His body locks, orgasm by electrocution, and then his knees go. He crumbles, slipping out of Pete’s mouth in a big dripping spill of Pete’s spit and Patrick’s come, and lands on his knees, sweaty wet and shining with rising bruises on his bitten inner thighs. Pete looks at him, swollen mouth and far-away eyes, like he’s a wonder undiscovered. Pete’s knees bump Patrick’s and he leans in to kiss Patrick with his wet, wet mouth. Patrick lets his forehead rest on Pete’s, kisses back blissfully, bonelessly. He can’t even breathe without moaning. He’s as ruined as Pete’s mouth, Pete’s slick dripping chin. He tastes himself on Pete. He considers the possibility that he’s actually dead.

He’s so lost in Pete, Pete’s mouth Pete’s eyes Pete’s body, and in his own aching, in the sweetness of wanting and the blinding wildness of  _ getting _ , that he doesn’t even hear the door open. He doesn’t hear anything but his own heartbeat pounding raucous in his ears until his dad’s behind them yelling, “ _ What the fuck is going on here? _ ”


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Happy Friday, babes! [Enjoy the music](https://open.spotify.com/user/marvelgirl238/playlist/3gcb1HSwSWvjNb6r5l66Nx) and enjoy the weather, and try not to cringe at Patrick too hard.
> 
> Next week: kisses, angst, misunderstandings, reconciliations!

 

Patrick springs away from Pete, or tries to: he’s hobbled by his half-mast pants and falls on his ass, his shining-wet red junk flopping horribly for all to see. While Patrick struggles back into his pants, his father’s yelling. Patrick expects ‘not under my roof’ this, homophobic that, a cacophony of worst case scenarios. Instead, his dad is moving towards Pete, his face tight red with fury, spitting, “He’s barely 18, do you hear me? A  _ kid _ . You’re not going to touch my son like that again. Get out of my house, get out of my house  _ now _ !”

“Mr. Stump,” Pete says. He’s backing away from Patrick’s dad, his hands out in front of him, “I didn’t—we—”

“I  _ saw _ what you did and didn’t do!” Patrick’s dad bellows. “How old are you, Pete?”

“Please, Dad—” Patrick tries.

“HOW OLD?”

“Twenty-three,” Pete says. His face is grey and unreadable. He’s looking at his own hands, twisting in front of himself. His voice is quiet and thick. Patrick wants to flee the planet entirely. He wants to shake his whole life like an Etch-a-Sketch, erase it all.

“Get the fuck out,” Patrick’s dad says. His voice is so cool and clear it could almost be mistaken for calm. 

Patrick wants to throw  himself in front of the door, to clutch at Pete’s hands, to shield Pete with his body and make him stay so Patrick doesn’t have to face his dad alone. But Patrick is so embarrassed he’s turned to stone: petrified volcanic ash, one of the skeletal relics of Pompeii. He can’t even move. He’s a ruin.

Pete walks right past him. Patrick doesn’t even reach out. Patrick lets him go.

 

Cut to Patrick and his dad facing off in the studio, a long, tense silence stretched between them. “Clean yourself up and come upstairs,” Patrick’s dad says at last. “We need to talk.” Patrick’s eyes are closed, so he can’t tell if his father’s expression matches his tone of disgust.

He keeps them closed til his dad’s footsteps have gone past, til he hears the door close, til he knows he’s alone.

Only then can he move. Bones unfrozen, joints unlocked, Patrick falls to his knees. It’s too late to plead for mercy.

 

He doesn’t want to go upstairs, but where else can he go? He lives here, kind of. Til his dad says he can’t. He just has to—to finish it.

Patrick puts himself back together as best he can, like being with Pete hasn’t changed him in some deep and unalterable way. 

He goes upstairs.

 

His dad is drinking a fucking margarita. Patrick, sweating like a farm animal and having had the greatest experience of his young life transmuted into the very worst in a single sharp moment, is kind of pissed about it. Patrick’s here with a damp dick preparing to be disowned, and suddenly his dad’s Jimmy Buffett?  _ Fuck _ that. Fuck all of this.

Being pissed feels better than being scared, as usual, so Patrick crosses his arms over his chest and goes with it. “Eighteen is old enough to make my own decisions,” he chooses as an opening line, which are bold words coming from someone without a job who hopes this man will pay for his tuition, room, and board for the next four years.

Patrick doesn’t really know his dad well enough to know what the look on his face means. His dad won’t quite look at him, keeps fixing his gaze on a spot two feet to the left like he’s staring down the afterimage of Patrick.

“Is this why you’re going to San Francisco?” his dad asks. “Are you—is it a gay thing?”

Patrick doesn’t know what’s worse: to be asked the question, or to not know its answer. He’d throw up right here on the kitchen floor except he’s not ready to lose the taste of Pete on his tongue.

Jimmy Buffett lets out a massive sigh and starts to pace. “Sit, Patrick,” he orders, though he clearly has no intention of sitting himself. Patrick slides himself onto one of the high stools at the counter because it’s better than standing here trying to look tough with a wet spot on the front of his shorts. 

“Of course it’s fine if you are,” his dad says. “I’m not prejudiced. I have friends who—well, you know what folk music is like.” Patrick does not, in fact, know what folk music is like, but it doesn’t seem to matter. His dad just keeps filling up the space in the room, like he doesn’t know Patrick is choking, like he doesn’t know what he’s just torn out of Patrick’s arms. “But it’s not an easy life, and you should think hard before you choose it. I don’t want to find out this way, finding you like—like I did—with a—. Well. I don’t want you thinking you have to run all the way to California to be yourself.”

Patrick doesn’t know what’s expected of him, here. It seems like his dad is going to great pains to  _ sound  _ accepting, but Patrick doesn’t feel especially accepted in this moment. Is he supposed to say thank you? He is not experiencing much gratitude beyond the awareness that this moment could be going even worse.

“I think we need to talk about your future, Patrick. The kind of choices you want to make. The kind of… people you want to be around,” his dad says.

The anger fists tighter in Patrick’s chest. Patrick’s dad is the least qualified person to offer unsolicited advice on Patrick’s future. “What does that mean,” Patrick asks flatly.

Patrick’s dad looks at him like he’s seeing his son for the first time. “It means—find a  _ nice  _ boy, if it’s a boy you decide you want. You said yourself: Pete’s an asshole. That kid has been nothing but trouble for years. Police cars, boot camp, girl after girl after girl, the loudest parties on the block, college and then back again, hospitals and back again—you name it. Whoever you think he is, he isn’t.” 

“He’s nice to me,” Patrick says. His voice is tight. His jaw aches from locking his teeth together.

Horribly, his dad chortles. “Oh, you think so? Bet there were some barely legal girls who used to say that about me, too. And I wasn’t, Patster. It might not seem like it at your age, but he’s using you.”

“So what you’re saying is,  _ you’re _ an asshole?”

“What I’m saying is, I don’t want you seeing him anymore.”

Patrick’s heart squeezes like a tube of toothpaste in his chest. “You don’t get to decide that,” he says. His blood is roaring so loudly it’s drowning out his own doubts about what he means to Pete, what he  _ wants _ to mean to Pete. He—he knows he’s not special, to a guy like Pete. This is not new information. But he doesn’t  _ need _ to be special. It’s not like he’s staying in fucking Wilmette. In a couple of weeks he’ll be living a whole entire life on the other side of this continent, with Pete Wentz nothing but a warm summer memory receding in his view. That’s fine with Patrick. That’s what Patrick wants.

“You live in my house,” his dad says, his voice gentle, and Patrick is just fucking done.

“Not anymore,” he declares. Jimmy Buffett is shocked into silence for once, a look on his face like he  _ did  _ step on a fucking pop top. Patrick hops off the barstool with as much dignity as a short guy can and sails grandly out the front door.

 

An hour later, Patrick has moved into a tent in Joe’s backyard that is probably about the same size his San Francisco apartment will be. Pete is his first formal visitor; Patrick invites him into the musty nylon orangeness and gives him the grand tour. Sleeping bag, water bottle, the fart corner, and the sour gummy worms, the only provision Joe has brought him thus far.

“Hang out a while?” Patrick invites apologetically. “Me and Joe are gonna order a pizza to the tent flap later. I bet all three of us can fit.”

But Pete’s got a weird look on his face. Patrick, dressed in cargo shorts and sitting cross-legged in a tent offering a 23 year old sour candy, starts to feel a little… juvenile. This isn’t the kind of vibe he wants to convey. Without warning or explanation, he throws the bag of gummy worms across the tent. They smack into the canvas wall.

“Your dad made some good points, Rick,” Pete says into the following silence. He’s only sitting on the other end of Patrick’s borrowed sleeping back, but it feels miles away. The static crackle of sexual tension that usual lights up between them, the heady gaze they get locked onto, trip on, fall into, the breath-held spaces between them where they get lost—it’s all gone. There’s just the Swelter, Patrick’s sticky skin, and a bad-smelling tent. Patrick’s got sour sugar crystals gritting his fingers. It does not feel like a power position.

“He made, like,  _ one _ point,” Patrick says.

“Yeah? Summarize it for me.”

Patrick puts on his best stodgy, disapproving dad voice, as if dorky impressions are going to improve this situation. “‘That Pete Wentz is nothing but trouble. He’s only going to break your heart.’” Then he laughs, awkward and unconvincing, and reverts to his normal, still dweeby-sounding voice. “Like I think this is something serious! How stupid does he think I am?”

It’s one of those moments when Patrick says what he thinks someone else wants to hear and hopes, secretly, to be corrected. This is a stupid way to get his needs met, however. It has never worked before, and it doesn’t work now. 

Pete’s face rearranges into a sexy smile, faster than Patrick can track his emotional reaction, and he leers alluringly. The sexual tension starts to creep back in, smearing the sweaty edges of Patrick’s vision. It’s like being under a heat lamp when Pete looks at him. Pete’s eyelids are low, his eyes all but concealed beneath them, spilling no secrets. He leans into Patrick’s space self-assured, the movement indulgent in a way that invites hours in bed exploring each other. The subject has very clearly changed: they aren’t talking about Patrick’s father anymore.

“Like, this is just a fun summer fuck, isn’t it?” Patrick babbles on, continuing his doomed strategy. “To both of us?”

“It’s whatever you say it is, baby,” Pete purrs, and it’s so over the top that Patrick can’t help it—he falls in. He’s on Pete in seconds, eager to dust sour sugar on every inch of skin he can reach. They’ve got an hour til Joe returns to this tent, and if it’s all just a  _ fun summer fuck _ ? Patrick’s not gonna waste another second.

 

They’re both shirtless, their skins flushed and rising with mouth-shaped bruises, when Joe comes back. 

“There’s no way it’s been an hour,” groans Pete. His voice is dry and cracked like desert soil. They haven’t spoken in a while; the last words they exchanged were Patrick asking,  _ how many tattoos do you have?  _ and Pete answering,  _ count them _ .

Joe, who is almost never wearing a shirt himself, seems totally unfazed as he unzips the tent flap and lets himself in. Patrick scoots away from Pete, trying to position himself in a way that conceals his throbbing arousal. He’s going to ache desperate til Joe leaves this tent and Pete’s back on top of him, his hips grinding deliberate, his hands tracing their intentional lines over Patrick’s skin. 

“You’re hosing this tent down when you’re done with it,” Joe informs them cheerfully. It’s his only apparent reaction to the scene. Patrick wipes excess moisture from his swollen mouth with the back of his hand. He’s breathing overhard, his chest heaving and pink with marks left by Pete’s teeth. He untangles his discarded shirt from Pete’s but doesn’t put it on yet. He’s extremely sweaty. It’s a relief, after what happened with his dad, that someone can interrupt him and Pete making out and act like it’s business as usual. It also speaks to how common this behavior must be in Pete, that Joe can find him all over someone new and not even bat an eyelash. Patrick feels glad and hurt at once. His heart is a big tangled soft spot, like the place on a fruit where the rind’s rotted through and juice leaks, tender-spoiled-sweet, showing what’s sickly and wet on the inside.

Pete ruffles his hair, shagging it in front of his eyes, and grins wolfish at Joe. “Don’t think I’m ever gonna be done with this kid,” he says. “Can you even believe he’s real?”

Patrick’s face turns a Crayola hue. He tugs his shirt over his head just to hide his face. He hates being looked at. He buries his shy smile in cotton. He likes Pete so much it feels dangerous. He knows exactly how stupid it would be to get attached.

“That’s what I’m here to talk about, actually,” Joe says. “Patrick Stump: Too Good To Be True? You Decide. Story at 11.” He drops his newscaster accent and goes on, “Andy’s on his way, actually. We’re gonna have a band meeting about The Kid.”

“Wait, am I The Kid?” Patrick asks, emerging from the neckhole of his shirt at last. He’s got his blush as under control as it ever is, he thinks.

“The one, the only,” Joe smiles.

“But why are we having a meeting about me?” False alarm: the blush is definitely  _ not _ under control.

Joe knocks softly on Patrick’s forehead with his fist, an inexplicable gesture that Patrick chooses to read as affection. “No spoilers,” Joe says. “Now, how many people in this tent are vegans today? It’s pizza o’clock.”

 

Andy arrives at the same time the pizza does. Four boys and two pizzas overfill the small, increasingly pungent tent. Patrick’s hat swooshes against the sloped nylon sides. “Where’s Tim?” Patrick asks. Pressed this close to Pete, it’s hard to get coherent words out.

“Haiti,” Andy says. “With Habitat for Humanity. That’s what the meeting is about.”

“We were invited to play the Square Roots Festival last-minute,” Joe explains.

“Wait, the folk festival? The one my dad’s in?” Patrick asks. The others nod. “But that’s next week.” More nodding. “How are you gonna become a folk band by next week?”

“And how are we gonna do it without Tim?” Pete adds. He leans on Patrick’s shoulder, nuzzling into Patrick’s neck without shame in front of his friends. It makes Patrick’s heartbeat stumble. 

“Here’s what we were thinking,” Joe says, a scheming gleam in his eyes that Patrick is already starting to recognize.

“What  _ you _ were thinking,” Andy corrects.

Joe flaps a hand at Andy dismissively. “What the entity known as Our Band was thinking. We were thinking, Patrick is a musician. Patrick plays  _ everything _ . Patrick probably either plays folk or can learn it in two minutes flat, with plenty of time left to learn our real songs that we can play once we’ve lulled them into complacency with Joni Mitchell covers.”

There’s a lot to process in there, especially when Pete’s in the proximity zone of cognitive disruption. “Even if he did those other things? Patrick doesn’t play on stage at festivals,” Patrick says.

“I bet Patrick does all kinds of things he never thought he would do,” Pete murmurs just for Patrick to hear. He winds his fingers around a lock of hair hanging out the back of Patrick’s hat and tugs. The sensation jolts through Patrick’s entire nervous system, lighting him up like a runway at night, all arrows and reflective beacons, ushering every spark of sweat and bead of blood to the same shining spot, like his whole body contracting at once to say  _ welcome home _ . There’s a whole new pathway seared into his brain about hair-pulling. His body shakes with the force of memory.

They’re not discreet, with Pete’s mouth nuzzled up in Patrick’s neck and his hand knotted in Patrick’s hair, Patrick’s eyes fluttering closed and his mouth opening in a soft, involuntarily  _ oh _ . Andy clears his throat loudly. When Patrick can see anything beside his own overwhelming visual memories again, Joe and Andy are both rolling their eyes.

“You played on stage with us like two days ago,” Joe points out.

Breathing a little harder than he’d like to admit, Patrick rejoins the conversation. “Yeah, one song. For like twenty half-listening people. On a six-inch riser. As a guest. And it was  _ Michael _ . Whole different scenario.”

“Is not—”

“That was my first time really performing for an audience,” Patrick blurts out, interrupting whatever coercion tactic Joe is about to deploy. His confession sets the tent to silent.

The tent settles into silence. “But you’re like, this big deal music student guy,” says Joe.

“And you’re  _ good _ ,” says Pete.

“I used to hate being on stage too,” says Andy.

Patrick hesitates. Part of him wants to be honest with these new friends about his anxiety, the way he’s balked at or fled every performance, the vomiting. Even for a small admissions board of three gently smiling professors, he freezes up. But he’s never admitted that to anyone. He lies. He uses his talent, the miracle of recording technology, and private concerts after the threat of large audiences and stages has passed to conceal his fear from—everyone. Not even his mom knows. Showcases are few and far between in the remoteness of the U.P., and his private instructor rarely pressures him to enter. It’s just taken for granted that he’s talented, that he’ll leave the U.P., that he’ll go on to do great things. That he’ll be a musician like his father. After all, his recordings sound so good.

This is one of those problems he’s kind of hoping he can just… leave behind, when he boards the plane to San Francisco.

Patrick wants to tell the truth, but he also wants these guys to think he’s cool. He wants to be as talented and capable as they think he is.

“I haven’t performed as part of a band, I mean,” he says quickly. “I’m not really used to playing with anyone else, and I don’t know your songs, and I like, don’t want to fuck up in front of a whole bunch of people who came to hear folk music. You know what the folk scene is like!”

The guys look just as perplexed by this baffling statement as Patrick was when he originally heard it. He feels a little slimy for misrepresenting himself, but mostly he feels relieved for having dodged a  topic he’s embarrassed about.

“Well,” says Joe, that gleam back in his eyes, “I guess it’s a good thing we have all week to practice.”

Patrick opens his mouth and closes it again. Pete plants a loud, smacking kiss on his neck. Andy regards him levelly in a way that makes him feel like he’s being smirked at.

And that’s how Patrick joins a punk band for a folk festival despite having no idea how he’s going to get up on a stage and sing.


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> morning, campers! brace yourself for tenderness and [enjoy the dope playlist](https://open.spotify.com/user/marvelgirl238/playlist/3gcb1HSwSWvjNb6r5l66Nx) you have all helped me craft.
> 
> see you next week for not talking about the future, climbing through windows at night, and Every Misunderstanding

 

Pete’s ceiling is cast in pale blue by the angled remains of daylight. Patrick’s body feels like a liquid, stripped down to boxers and speckled with sweat. The air is honey on his skin.

Lazily, Pete’s hands rove over his stretched-out skin, making a map of light touch and shuddered response. They breathe in time, synced things sunk together. Patrick feels infinite when they’re together like this. Fooling around is good, of course it is—mind-blowing, heart-rending, dick-busting, all of it. But laying like this, after, in the space they’ve hollowed out of the whirling universe that is theirs and theirs alone? This, Patrick lives for.

“This has been my favorite week,” Pete pronounces. One of his hands grips Patrick’s hipbone. The other finds Patrick’s hand flopped on the mattress and interlaces their fingers.

“Ever?” Patrick asks sleepily. He turns his head to look at Pete. Pete smiles instinctively, automatically, when their eyes meet. Pete lays curled towards him, studying him like there’s going to be a quiz later on the color of Patrick’s eyes, the slope of Patrick’s nose. It is a heady feeling, being regarded so. The more hours of eye contact they accumulate, the more Patrick feels like he’s falling headfirst. The more Patrick feels like he should feel frightened, but does not.

Pete purses his lips and looks up, thinking. “Well, there was a pretty good week when I was 13 and we went to the Wisconsin Dells. We dominated some water parks, and my dad bought me a skateboard at a gift shop. But you might beat it. You might be my new Cowabunga water slide.”

Patrick wriggles on the bed, scooting closer to the curl of Pete. It’s too humid, strictly speaking, for much of their skin to comfortably touch. Their sweat will stick them together. Patrick kind of wants to get flypaper-stuck. “Can I be your lazy river instead?”

“Nope, sorry. That’s the worst ride,” Pete says. He grips Patrick’s wrists intensely, widening his eyes. “ _ Adrenaline! _ Gotta have it. Lazy river? More like fall asleep and drown creek.”

Patrick laughs, trying to prise his wrists free from Pete’s steel-fingered hold. “Come down to the bottom of the seeeeea with meeee,” he croons creepily. “Breathe bubbles for eterrrrrrrnity.”

Pete drops his wrists and tries to cover his mouth instead. “Oh my god, stop! Are you a man-eating mermaid now? Are you an actual literal siren? I’m too pretty to die so young!”

They grapple, rolling in the bed, trying to catch each other’s hands. Patrick snaps his teeth, laughing, growling like he’ll bite Pete’s face off if he gets in range. Pete shrieks when Patrick pins him, straddling his hips and fitting his snarling teeth around Pete’s neck.

Patrick bites and licks, threatening with pressure. Pete’s vocal cords vibrate against Patrick’s tongue as he says, “Stay.”

Patrick goes still, poised to tear Pete’s throat out. Pete’s pulse pounds against Patrick’s teeth. Patrick doesn’t breathe.

“I want you to stay,” says Pete.

Patrick unhooks his teeth carefully. He pulls back, lifting his head to look into Pete’s eyes. Pete blinks slow, dark lashes over amber. Patrick sees him swallow hard.

“I was planning on it,” Patrick says, his voice low, as if any sudden noise or movement might spook this moment like a wild thing and they’ll only be able to helplessly watch it recede, gone forever. He’s been sleeping here in Pete’s second bed all week, having lasted exactly one night in Joe’s humid backyard tent. They’ve been having marathon band practices, interrupted by very infrequent showers and these buzzing, blissy hours of reciprocal nakedness and eye-gazing. Dale Wentz has been feeding him. No one’s asked about his dad. 

“I don’t mean the night,” Pete says. Patrick wishes Pete would close his eyes. It’s too much. It’s much too much.

Patrick didn’t think Pete meant the night. But Patrick doesn’t know how to answer it, the other thing Pete’s asking. It’s too fast. It’s just casual. They don’t really mean anything to each other. Pete does this stuff all the time, with all kinds of people.

It is important that this be true.

Patrick can’t stay. San Francisco is going to change his life, show himself to himself for the first time, strip away everything he’s ever hid behind. Patrick doesn’t  _ want _ to stay.

“I didn’t go to my Northwestern audition,” Patrick has no idea why he says. He closes his own eyes to escape Pete’s gaze.

Pete laughs softly. “I know,” he says. 

Patrick drops his face into Pete’s collarbone, hiding. “What? How?”

“My dad’s a dean there. He told me months ago, the last time you were in town.”

“Why would your dad tell you things about me?” Pat moans into Pete’s clavicle.  He’s embarrassed in ten different ways at once.

Pete turns his head enough to kiss Patrick behind the ear, at the top of the jaw. “Because,” he says between firm, nuzzling kisses, “I  _ like _ you.” He rolls his hips just enough to press the heat of his dick against Patrick’s. “Is that not obvious?”

All kinds of things are happening in Patrick’s heart at the thought of Pete Wentz thinking and talking about him months ago. He refuses to feel them. He turns his attention to the feelings in his groin instead. He pushes up against Pete’s hips, turns his hiding into kissing Pete’s neck, open-mouthed and hungry.

Pete arches back into the mattress and lets out one of the groans Patrick has come to treasure. “Babe. Wait,” Pete says, his breath strained. “Why didn’t you go to the audition? I’m the king of blowing things off, but you don’t seem like one of my subjects.”

Patrick kisses harder, because if Pete can still think straight enough to give him shit, Patrick’s not doing his job. Pete squirms, dislodging Patrick, and pushes him back with his tattooed forearm. “Wait, I said!” he laughs. “Sweating with you in Joe’s garage, learning the give-and-take rhythm of playing together, touching you,  _ being _ with you—it’s so good, Rick. Let me know you. Let me be close to you in this way too. Is it your dad? Is that why?”

Patrick realizes he’s not kissing his way out of this.  _ Let me know you _ ? Fuck. His shitty, stupid heart bursts into flower.

Defeated, he flops sideways, dropping face-first onto the mattress. There’s lots of things he’s never told anyone about himself that Pete knows. Lots of things he’s never done before, lots of ways he’s never been seen, that he’s done with and shown to Pete. So why not this, too? Why not pour all his secrets out into this silver-shine boy, this cracked yet perfect vessel, and trust Pete to hold him—to hold him all?

To Pete’s bedsheets, he speaks his confession: “I got scared.”

Pete traces circles on his back, his black-polished fingers tripping curiously along Patrick’s skin. They make it harder to breathe but easier, somehow, to speak. 

“I bet auditions are really nerve-wracking,” Pete soothes.

Patrick shakes his head, smashing his face into the sheets. “Not just auditions. Everything. I try to get on stage, to perform. And I just… freeze. I can’t do it. My feet don’t move except to run the other way. One time I made it all the way onto the stage before I locked up. The curtain came up, the concert hall just filled with people, all of them staring at me, all  _ waiting _ … I threw up on the piano, Pete. All over the keys. Chunks everywhere. Never set foot on a stage again. Til last week, with you guys.”

All Patrick can see is Pete’s Star Wars sheets. He has no idea what Pete’s face looks like, no clue as to what Pete’s thinking. Pete’s traveling fingers are smoothing the skin over Patrick’s shoulder blade, stroking again and again.

Face burning somewhere between humiliation and relief, Patrick adds, “I only got into SFCM because they accepted tapes alone—no live audition required. I’ve never told anyone before.”

“Yeah, I’m sure no one even noticed the puke,” Pete teases gently. It breaks the tension enough that Patrick can lift his face and glare. Pete’s face holds nothing but kindness. The sexy vibe is definitely dead. Vom stories are a real bonerkiller.

“Thank you for telling me,” Pete says. “It’s gotta be hard, to be so talented and not be able to show anyone. Are you feeling more comfortable with the band? No one expects you to do the festival if you don’t want to. Well, Joe does, but I can let him down easy.”

Patrick lets go of a breath he’s been holding for years. He looks into Pete’s still, gold eyes. He says what he hopes is true:

“I want to play with you guys.”

Pete grins with more brilliance than any July. He crashes into Patrick like the tide. At last, he kisses Patrick on the mouth.

 

Next morning, Patrick’s in the shower, hoping Pete might join him, when the boy himself sticks his head around the shower curtain and says, “I’ll meet up with you at Joe’s, okay? Start without me.”

Patrick gets shampoo in his startled eyes, they fly open so fast. “Wait, where will you be?”

“I have an appointment,” Pete says mysteriously. He leans further in, ducking his head under the spray, and kisses Patrick’s wet shoulder. Then he’s gone.

Patrick’s halfway to Joe’s house before the thought hits him: Pete’s with someone else. They’ve been together nonstop for four days straight; it makes sense that Pete needs a break. That Pete has other relationships and obligations to maintain. Pete  _ lives _ here. Patrick’s the one just passing through. 

Patrick pedals harder on the bike he stole from his dad, ruining his shower with sliding, crevice-seeking July sweat. His shirt is soaked through by the time he gets there. Usually it’s hard for him to perform without the dizzy-drunk proximity of Pete, but he finds that his skin feels hot, the muscles underneath knotted and stormy. He picks up his guitar by its neck and marches straight for the makeshift microphone. Joe and Andy fall into place around him, the tension and energy that cords between them like a familiar net, like a rope they’ve been weaving this last week. Patrick anticipates Andy’s drumbeat before he hears it, relies on it with an ease he couldn’t have imagined as a solo performer, starts to play with complete faith that the others will be there on their cues. They are. Their commingled sounds rise up around them, thickening the already thick air. It’s the first day they really sound  _ good _ —tight—working together, at the same time, for the same song. Except the bass, of course. They’re missing the bass. Their bassist has an  _ appointment _ . He’s  _ otherwise occupied _ . It’s fine. They’re like a punk band from the Pacific Northwest. They don’t need bass. They’re better without it. Patrick plays hard, sings hot, grows strong in anger. He plays at the low range of his instrument, solid and strong, coordinating with Andy in a way they haven’t discussed, a way that makes the folk classics they’re learning meaty and raw and discordant. Better this way. Wouldn’t change it.

It feels good up here. Even with Pete nowhere around. It feels like something Patrick’s never quite felt before. It feels right, like belonging.

 

When Pete does show up, he keeps ducking out of the garage to take calls on his annoying little flip phone. If anyone gets near him, he walks further away, keeping them out of earshot. Patrick is having an increasingly hard time acting cool about it. 

When they break around dusk, descending on a plate of vegan pizza rolls Joe’s mom has brought out, Patrick avoids Pete pissily. He turns all the way away from Pete to talk to Andy, or gets up and moves when Pete sits down beside him on the couch, placing himself on the other side of Joe under the thin pretense of wanting to more clearly hear Joe’s opinions on the latest Lifetime record.

Patrick’s licking pizza sauce off his fingers and heading back for the garage when Pete catches his elbow. Andy and Joe troop back to their instruments, discussing the set list, but Pete holds Patrick captive. Beneath their feet, Joe’s driveway bears the bleached-out colors of sidewalk chalk. Patrick scuffs the edge of a hopscotch ladder with his sneaker huffily.

“You’re mad at me,” Pete observes. Patrick has the snarling urge to deny it, but what would the point be? It is obvious to all of them that it’s true. He thinks about the version of himself he wants to present, the one he wants Pete to remember when he blazes out of Pete’s life like a hot, not swiftly forgotten memory. He resents that Pete is forcing him into this sullen shape instead.

“It’s just kind of insulting that you’re sneaking around,” Patrick says. His voice has a sneer in it. His heart is beating so hard he can barely hear himself speak. 

“Sneaking around?” Pete echoes.

Patrick isn’t in the mood. “You don’t have to hide it, it’s not like it’s some big secret that you’re seeing other people! We’re not, like, committed to each other. We’re not soulmates after a week of sloppy handjobs. I’m just, like, one of your sex friends. We barely know each other. It’s not a big deal.”

“Rick,” says Pete. His face looks pained.

“This doesn’t mean anything,” Patrick says loudly. He talks faster, louder, to blot out anything Pete might say. He can’t bear to be talked out of this rant. “It doesn’t mean anything to you and it certainly doesn’t mean anything to me.”

“Oh,” says Pete.

Patrick can’t stop now. “Even if I had gotten into Northwestern, it’s not like I’d stay  _ here _ , you know? My life, my real life, my career as a solo artist and everything I’ve always worked for—it’s waiting for me in San Francisco. So there would be no point in getting attached, or like, pretending this is more than it is. I have zero illusions about what this is. So like, fuck who you want.  _ I _ don’t care.”

It’s like he thinks if he can say all the shitty things first, Pete will have nothing left to break his heart with. It’s like he doesn’t think at all. He just opens his mouth and ruins things. It feels delicious.

Pete just blinks at him, as if to say,  _ finished? _ Something horrible claws its way up Patrick’s throat. If he stays here, looking at Pete, he will cry. So he does the worst possible thing, which is shrug one shoulder and point a finger gun at Pete. “Back to the work, champ,” he hears himself say from the trauma-insulated distance at which he imagines people witness their own deaths.

And he leaves Pete standing there with his feet in hopscotch squares and a tangled look on his face, and marches back to Joe’s garage to work on his Bob Dylan.

 

Practice is breaking up, each of them winding cords and stowing instruments. Beyond the single bare bulb illuminating Joe’s garage, it’s full dark, all the blue bled out of the night. A few fireflies straggle, blinking their lovelorn lights. “Idiot bugs,” Patrick mutters. He’s in a foul temper now that the music is done. It had suspended him, trapped in happy light; now he’s back on earth and crabby.

A few minutes ago, deep in the guts of a song, he’d felt lifted up, bursting with energy and power, connected to the boys around him, alive alive  _ alive _ . This is why he plays music, this feeling: not because he wants to, not because he loves it, but because he  _ must _ . Because it is part of him, his blood brains heartbeat. Because there is no way for him not to. Because it is his home, the only place he feels like himself. The only time he knows who this  _ self _ person even is.

It is so different, feeling that way in front of other people, instead of just alone in a practice room, solo in the catacomb of headphones.

He hasn’t decided yet, whether he likes it. And before he can, practice ends; the feeling recedes. He’s left with the options of going home with Pete, who he’s mad at; awkwardly asking Joe if he can stay here and also borrow some underwear, because he ran out days ago; or showing up on his dad’s doorstep, tail between his legs. None of these options are especially appealing.

Then his options narrow sharply, as a voice he can’t pretend not to recognize comes from the curb: “Hey, Patster! Sounding good, bud.”

There, in a parked car with the windows down, is his father.

Patrick freezes like his guts are magnetized to the molten core of the earth. He’d never move again, except Pete knocks into him with his shoulder from behind. He stumbles forward, step by step, with Pete pushing him towards his dad. Finally Patrick’s standing at the driver’s side window of his dad’s car, leaning back against Pete’s unyielding chest like he’d faint backwards to get out of this situation if he could.

It’s dark, but his dad’s face looks kind of red. A cheery look is affixed rather jarringly to his tense face.

“What are you doing here?” Patrick asks brusquely. He grabs Pete’s hand firmly, holds their clasped hands to his chest like it’s a way of shouting  _ fuck you _ .

His dad’s eyes lock onto those hands. He’s receiving the message. His rigid grin does not match his squeamish eyes. With effort, he says, “I want to make things right.” In spite of everything, his voice sounds genuine. “I was an ass. Playing the same festival as my son—I’m so proud, Patrick. How can I not trust your decisions, when you impress me so damn much? Come home, son. I don’t want to waste any more of our time together.”

Patrick does and doesn’t want to accept this apology. It doesn’t address the full measure of his hurt, and the way his dad’s eyes keep getting stuck on Pete’s hand in his shows the weak spot in his dad’s good intentions. But, confrontational as Patrick can be, even he doesn’t want to leave for college while in a feud with the man paying for it. Nor does he want to spend the night lying awake in Pete’s extra bed, his guts curdling on raw jealousy like bad sushi. No matter how many times he swallows it, it comes back up, tasting of bile and burning like stomach acid.

Patrick is leaving in less than a week. His skin burns, scored by the fleetingness of time. His heart smarts like sunburn. Summer is infinite and summer is ending. Soon it will be August, and his life will begin again on the other side of the country. He will be reduced to the contents of a suitcase. He doesn’t want any more baggage than that weighing him down.

Patrick drops Pete’s hand from his. On his hip, Pete’s other hand tightens in an encouraging squeeze. Patrick feels complicated about it. Rather, his dick feels very straightforward about it; his heart is jagged and poorly fit together, things meant to be kept in spilling out instead.

“I’ve never played a festival before,” Patrick tells his dad. It is the biggest concession he can bring himself to make. “You’ll have to show me the ropes.”

Patrick’s dad’s face blows up with light. He’s so palpably relieved to be ‘forgiven’ that Patrick kind of wishes he hadn’t let him off the hook. This is his first time coming out, though, he guesses. He’s gonna make some missteps. 

“I’ll be your roadie!” his dad effuses. “You guys can boss me around. I’ll set up your amps.”

“Yeah, okay,” Patrick mumbles.

Over his shoulder, Pete says, “Do you still want to walk back with me? Or...?”

This is probably a diplomatic way of letting him choose where he stays tonight. He knows that. But Patrick tenses under Pete’s touch anyway. Where will Pete go, if Patrick leaves with his dad? Will he find his own bed or someone else’s?

Patrick decides he doesn’t want to know the answer. He shrugs out of Pete’s anchoring touch and slouches around his dad’s car. He gets in, not looking at either of the men watching him.

His dad’s voice is soft like relief from fear as he says, “Thanks, Patster. Means a lot to me.” Pete’s voice is far away; the warm nighttime air and aching drone of cicadas sweep away the sound and shape of his murmured goodbye.

Patrick, needing to get used to leaving Pete behind, practices not looking back.


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> mood: shiftless inside, 70 degrees outside. let's go ramble through the sunshine together. i'll bring [the tunes](https://open.spotify.com/user/marvelgirl238/playlist/3gcb1HSwSWvjNb6r5l66Nx), you bring the cute.
> 
> today: summer boyfriends orbit each other. patrick thinks he's the oceanic pole of inaccessibility, but he is wrong. there are collisions.  
> next friday: THE FESTIVAL

 

Patrick keeps his distance from Pete, insofar as such a thing is possible when they’re practicing eight hours a day, for the rest of the days leading up to the festival. 

Do they make out in the rain outside Joe’s garage? Does he wear Pete’s red hoodie home and smell it all night in his dreams, chasing the memory of Pete’s coconut shampoo? Does they eat lunch on Pete’s deck, served by Dale Wentz, til the inevitable moment Pete cannonballs into the pool, drenching both Patrick and his plate with the spray? Do they get each other off quick, quiet, frantic, rubbing through cargo shorts, in the Trohmans’ kitchen while their friends wait for them downstairs? Yes, yes to all of it.

But Patrick doesn’t confess anything else, and Pete doesn’t ask about the future, and they don’t go home together after practice. In his dad’s house, Patrick keeps the blinds closed. He stays away from the windows. He goes to a dive bar to watch his dad play with a small-time local band. Another night they go out for pizza, Stump men filling themselves with rubbery cheese to congeal in the space left by all the words they aren’t going to say to each other. Patrick is careful to spend very little time alone.

He’s so cut off from himself by the time the night before the festival rolls around, Patrick has a hard time figuring out why he can’t fall asleep. He rolls around on his hard mattress, getting sweatier with each revolution. When he lays still, all he can think about is how fast his heart is beating, or the irregular squeak of the ceiling fan that seems to erupt terribly at the  _ precise _ moment he starts to psychically unclench and drift towards sleep. 

He’s working himself into a state when a new noise enters his humid awareness: a collision, something hitting the siding from outside the house. A tree branch? A bird? A large owl? No—bigger—it’s scraping, dragging. It’s a serial killer. It’s a Komodo dragon. Whatever it is, it is definitely 100% beyond all doubt here to end Patrick’s life. 

He’s almost too scared to look. But the only thing worse than locking eyes with your killer is dying in horror-movie suspense, so Patrick reaches out a tentative, flinching hand, twitches back the shade to peer down from his top-bunk vantage onto the sloping half-roof below his window.

He lets out a strangled, undignified semi-shriek when he sees a large, dark monster form crawling below. On hands and knees, it drags itself towards Patrick’s window. It lifts its shrouded, shaggy head, and—

And only Patrick Stump is dumb enough to be surprised to see Pete Wentz. He scrambles down from the top bunk, shaky from useless terror and furious with himself and Pete too. He wrenches the shade aside and tugs open the window.

“What the fuck?” Patrick hisses.

“What light through yonder window breaks? It is the east, and Patrick is the sun!” Pete moons back grandly, clinging to the tiny decorative slant of roof like some kind of oversize bat.

Patrick is tempted to let Pete fall to his death, really he is. “How did you even get up here?”

“Ladder.”

“ _ Why _ ?”

Pete grins like he’s trying to impress a dentist. “To see you,” he says, as if this is perfectly obvious.

Patrick supposes it is. He sighs, to make it clear how annoying Pete is, then leans out the window to help haul Pete into his bedroom. It makes a racket—this plus the shriek seems sure to have woken his father. Patrick hopes he won’t decide to investigate the telltale sounds of home invasion; the peace they’ve struck is deeply tenuous, based on mutual avoidance of the topic of Pete. (They’ve been talking about baseball a lot. And Woodie Guthrie. There have been silences. Many silences.) Pete in Patrick’s bedroom past midnight would not go over well, is Patrick’s prediction.

Pete sprawls on Patrick’s bedroom floor, looking at the posters of rocket ships and guitars still thumb-tacked to the ceiling from years ago, when Patrick’s dad invited him and Kevin to decorate. One of them, an outdated highway map of the United States, seems to particularly capture Pete’s interest. “Figured you wouldn’t be sleeping,” he says, with the same determined brightness Patrick’s noticed in his voice all week, ever since they squabbled. 

“Usually I can sleep anywhere,” Patrick says. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me tonight.”

“You mean other than that you’re a cunning bag of anxieties and unrest shaped like a boy?” Pete’s raised eyebrow seems to really be going out of its way to mock Patrick tonight.

“ _ Wow _ . How’d I go from Juliet Capulet to a  _ bag _ in two minutes? You gotta work on your bedside manner, Wentz. Next time I’m leaving you on the roof.”

“I call it like I see it, Jules.” Pete gestures to the pinned-up map with his angular chin, shadows falling distractingly over his face. “We’re gonna have to take that down to plan our cross-country tour once our folk band makes it big,” Pete tells him. “I’ve got a feeling this festival is where we get discovered.”

Patrick wants to be cool, casual, sexy, laugh along with the joke like one of the more sophisticated people Pete fucks surely would. But the mention of the festival, the idea of  _ anyone _ watching him play, let alone a talent scout evaluating the quality of that performance, knifes icy through Patrick’s sweaty stomach. His heart speeds anew. Everything in his body begins to feel—curdled.

He sits down cross-legged next to Pete’s head and frets.

“What’s going on in there, troubled thoughts?” Pete asks after a while.

Patrick can barely stand the kind look in Pete’s eyes. He’s here for sexiness, not motherfucking  _ compassion _ . He just shakes his head, not trusting what will come out if he tries to speak.

Pete reaches up and brushes Patrick’s cheek, soft in the dark. “Stage fright, huh?” he asks. “Have you tried picturing me in my underwear? In no underwear? Do you want me to play the festival in no underwear?”

“You on stage without underwear is not going to improve my focus or performance up there!”

“But will it reduce your anxiety? Here, let’s find out.” Grinning again, Pete starts unbuttoning his jeans.

“Stop yourself,” Patrick protests, even as he is unable to stop himself from laughing. He tries to contain Pete’s hands while Pete tugs at his zipper, rocking his hips against Patrick’s hands, a look of pure evil on his face.

“Just wanna distract you, baby. You distracted?” he teases.

Then they’re wrestling, Pete’s pants low on his hips and mostly undone, two boys rolling and scrabbling with more of their bodies touching than they have in days. Patrick starts thinking dark bedroom thoughts, the kind that make his dick feel like it has a sunburn. For just a moment, in the post-midnight no man’s land between yesterday and tomorrow, he lets himself think about how soon he’s leaving. How little time they have left together. How few moonless nights in hot bedrooms with squealing ceiling fans. The fist of endings tightens around Patrick’s heart. Pete is something shining, full, and unexpected that was never his to keep. He’s always known it. Goodbye is paralyzing, galvanizing. He contains vastnesses, each aching and hollow on its own; together they are a drowning crush of emptiness. They are a black hole. He wants to stuff himself full of Pete til he can’t tell the difference between them, til he mistakes Pete’s tattoos for his own, til they have just one heartbeat. 

He wants to fuck Pete and spite the entire concept of linear time.

Nothing that begins needs an end. Not one thing. He catches one of Pete’s wrists, pins it to the ground, and crashes into him. Patrick kisses him, hard and full and open-mouthed, and Pete reacts instantly, like he was a lock waiting to spring at the first brush of the key. Pete kisses in such a particular way, sloppy-starving one moment and controlling-denying the next. Like he can’t decide if he’s begging for it or if he wants Patrick to beg. One moment he holds Patrick in place, pulling just out of range, letting Patrick strain against his grip in the effort of getting closer; he kisses like a car crash the next, skidding reckless into Patrick’s lips, tongue-desperate, made of teeth and whirlpool-suck and glide.

Patrick’s only in pajamas—a t-shirt and boxers—which turns out to be a tactical disadvantage. Pete’s hipbone grinds into his pelvis, into this soft throbbing previously untapped spot buried somewhere in his low belly, and as Pete begins to undulate his hips Patrick lets out an involuntary moan. He’s hard, he’s been hard for days, he’s dripping. Pete’s hands on his ass hold him relentless, hold him still so the motion of bone against his softest-hardest spots can fucking ruin him. He snugs his thigh up closer between Pete’s legs, mad for it, and is gratified to find Pete hard too. He blacks out on pure bliss for a second, bearing his weight down into Pete’s tidal motion, licking against Pete’s giving lips and withholding teeth. He could lose consciousness like this, stop breathing forever, fuck himself against Pete’s hip til his boxers are unsalvageable and he comes apart. Then Pete grabs the back hem of his shirt and tears at it, so the collar chokes him a little and Patrick kisses down into Pete harder, not caring that he can’t quite breathe. Patrick’s free hand slides under Pete’s shirt, finds Pete’s pierced nipple with thoughtless sensation-seeking. His hips begin to sync up with Pete’s, growing that  _ feeling _ . His dick slides between them. It’s not til Pete covers his mouth with a rough hand that he even notices he’s being loud, making low-throated sounds somewhere between moaning and singing.

“Making songs for me again, baby,” Pete pants into the muffled darkness. It is the sexiest fucking thing Patrick has ever heard.

“Want to—fuck you,” Patrick says into Pete’s hand, so far beyond thought it’s probably miraculous he’s still speaking English.

Or the opposite of a miracle. Because as soon as he’s spoken, Pete stops moving. Pete goes stiller than the space between Patrick’s suddenly frozen heartbeats.

“Don’t want to fuck,” Pete says. Of all the worst possible things Patrick has imagined Pete saying (“I never liked you,” “I have ten girlfriends who all kiss better than you,” “I see you more like a little brother”), this one never even ranked. He’d be impressed Pete came up with something even his anxiety couldn’t churn out if he wasn’t so busy short-circuiting.

“I can feel your dick on my leg,” Patrick says stupidly.

Terribly, Pete’s hand has dropped away from his mouth. The points of contact between them are going out swifter than city blocks during a power outage.

“Well, yeah,” says Pete. He squirms uncomfortably, pushing away from Patrick. Patrick lets out an involuntary whimper as the hot-good of Pete’s body slides away from his damp, aching groin. Patrick wants to press rewind on this night, possibly this whole summer. How does he keep fucking up so phenomenally? Why can’t he stop?

“Obviously I want you,” Pete’s saying, gesturing to his undisguisable boner. There’s a wet spot on his jeans that Patrick hopes, furiously and with great embarrassment, is not from him. “But that doesn’t mean I wanna fuck, like, right here and right now.”

Patrick has a working understanding of consent, but this conversation isn’t making a lot of sense to him. It feels like it’s spiralling. “You keep saying there’s no time to waste,” he points out. “And I’m leaving in like, a matter of days. So before we never see each other again, shouldn’t we…?”

If Patrick had any hope fixing things between them, of saving this moment, he should not have opened his fucking garbage disposal mouth.

Pete is scooting even farther away. Now he isn’t touching Patrick at all. Catastrophic power failure: the whole eastern seaboard has been plunged into darkness. Pete’s grimacing, which probably indicates something, only Patrick has spewed too much stupid bullshit out his trash chute to know what part Pete objects to.

“I get it, okay?” Pete says. Which, great. Maybe he can explain it to Patrick. “I get what this is to you. But—it’s not that to me. I’m not like you. I don’t just—do this kind of thing. Maybe you leaving so soon is  _ why _ I don’t want to fuck you.”

Patrick is so stung by this burst of accusation and ire that he can’t reply, not even to ask what in the damn hell Pete means. Pete’s taking all his lines, he feels like. Well, except ‘I don’t want to fuck.’ That’s kind of the opposite of Patrick’s dialogue menu right now.

Pete’s buttoning his pants, moving towards the window. Patrick’s losing him. They’re entering tomorrow; midnight is over. They’re already lost. “I’m gonna go,” Pete tells him. His voice is rough. “I’m sorry I gave you the wrong idea. I’m sorry I  _ got _ the wrong idea.”

“Don’t go out the window,” Patrick says as Pete steps onto the sill like he really is Peter Pan. What he means is, don’t go at all. What he says is, “Use the door.”

Pete hesitates. Patrick cannot tell what he is thinking. Patrick does not know how to apologize or what to apologize for. He doesn’t know how to undo the last five minutes. He doesn’t know how to make Pete come back.

“Try to get some sleep,” Pete mutters, passing Patrick on his way to the door. “You’re gonna be amazing either way, but. I’ll feel better if you get some rest.”

With that bizarre tenderness, Pete is gone. Patrick is so torn up and rattled he can’t even jerk off. He puts his headphones on, covers his face with his stale-smelling pillow, and ignores his boner til he falls asleep.

 

Festival day, and Patrick’s dad wakes him up with banana pancakes, the king of breakfast foods and Patrick’s lifelong favorite. He’d be touched his dad remembered, except his current level of panic is cutting off all communication with any part of his brain that does anything but scream. He shovels syrupy, chocolate chip studded goodness into his mouth mechanically, barely tasting it. Four bites in, his stomach rolls over itself, cramping with nausea. He pushes the plate away.

His dad is beaming at Patrick across the table, like he’s drinking a glass of sunshine instead of OJ. Patrick can’t handle it. He drops his forehead to the table and moans. “What’s up, Patster? Aren’t you excited for our big day?”

“Nervous,” Patrick manages. He can feel his gorge rising. He’s never stress-puked hours in advance before—usually it’s a moment-of type experience. What a fun new frontier he’s cresting today. “Maybe a hologram of me can play instead,” he says nonsensically. “Like Jem.”

His dad’s hand claps onto his back, jostling the uneasy contents of his stomach. With too much gusto, his dad proclaims, “A musician of your calibre has nothing to be nervous about! Can’t wait to be dazzled by you and your band. I’m so proud of you.”

Yep. Emergency evacuation. Patrick runs to the bathroom. He doesn’t quite make it in time.

 

“He’s says he’s puking up pancakes,” Patrick can hear Joe telling someone else in the room. The cordless phone is clammy in his hand. He’s curled around the toilet, covered in a sheen of sweat, trying to guess which end his anxiety’s gonna bust out of next. He just needs to get out of this festival. He just needs a way out and he’ll be okay.

“Andy says he doesn’t usually endorse substance use, but he thinks getting high with me will really help,” Joe says, this time into the phone. 

“I DID NOT!” Patrick hears Andy yelp in the background.

He smiles in spite of himself. His teeth feel gritty with regurged oatmeal. It is a singularly awful sensation. He stops smiling immediately.

“Hey, stop, I’m—” Joe gets cut off. Patrick hears sounds of a scuffle, then Pete’s voice fills his ear. It is the last voice Patrick wants to hear; that’s basically the whole reason he called Joe and not Pete to bail in the first place.

“We both know you’re not sick,” Pete says. His voice is low, serious, challenging.

Patrick’s guts writhe hotly, like they’ll prove right now how sick he is. Apparently Pete doesn’t want him either way, but Patrick would still prefer not to hurl on the phone with him.

“Suddenly you’re an expert on me,” Patrick says. There’s more bite in his voice than he intended. The anxiety roars sharp and ugly in his blood.

“Yeah, maybe I am,” Pete bites back. “Maybe I’m sick of seeing you run away from everything that scares you. Maybe I’m sick of the way you’ve got one foot out the door before you’ve even said hello. Maybe I think you should let yourself do something that scares you, something that’s bigger than you, for the first time in your fucking life!”

“Fuck you!” The words burst furious out of Patrick without his permission, but he doesn’t regret them. First Pete rejects him, now he’s using something difficult Patrick shared with him against him in an  _ argument _ ? No. Absolutely no. Pete’s a fucking bully, just like he was six  years ago. Patrick can’t believe he fell for it for even a second. Fell for the whole handsome, sexy, funny, kind CHARADE. He really is an idiot. Pete really is an asshole.

Patrick says the most cutting thing he can think of, which is: “I just want you to know that that day when I got a boner on the slip’n’slide? THAT WASN’T ABOUT YOU!”

Then he hang up the phone and slams the handset into the bathroom floor, like he can punish it somehow for the words it carried to his ear.

The good news is, he’s so pissed he’s not nauseous anymore. Oh, he’s gonna play the fucking festival all right. He’s gonna play the best fucking under-rehearsed set of folk covers and garage band 3-chord no-hit-wonders anyone’s ever heard. And if he feels like vomming again when he’s on stage? He’s gonna aim for Pete’s hair.


	10. Chapter 10

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> to those of you who want to throttle patrick because of his wild assumption-making and refusal to just communicate ((or even identify what it's appropriate to communicate about)): you seem wise. come fix my life?
> 
> to those you who *are* patrick, and see no need to seek verification for things you have already decided are true: get under this blanket with me, it's a little sweaty in here but that seems better than facing the world, don't you think?
> 
> [tunes!](https://open.spotify.com/user/marvelgirl238/playlist/3gcb1HSwSWvjNb6r5l66Nx)
> 
> see you next week for: Saying Goodbye With Tacos

 

Patrick’s dad wants to drive to Square Roots together, which Patrick expects to be terrible but is actually kind of cool. His dad has a mini trailer for his car with built-in racks for guitars and amps and cords. Patrick feels a little bit like a rock star, slipping his red Gibson SG Special in there with his dad’s instruments, which are all either battered beyond belief or outrageously shiny and expensive-looking, like the Ibanez Talman with the mother-of-pearl inlays. His dad puts aviators on to drive, which should be ridiculous, but actually Patrick thinks he looks awesome. Cool Dad is out in full force. He rolls the windows down, filling the car with the texture and hose-water smell of summer in the Midwest, and blasts the radio to whatever Patrick chooses.

Just when Patrick’s thinking this is better than riding with the guys after all, his dad turns down the music and says, “I want you to know I had a conversation with Pete’s parents about the two of you, and—”

“WHAT?” Patrick is yelling before he’s really even processed the horrible words coming out of his dad’s mouth. “YOU DID  _ WHAT _ ?”

His dad chuckles in a patronizing-but-alarmed manner that makes Patrick want to choke him out. “Easy there, Patster. You know I had—concerns about him, his history, his… intentions. So I sat down with his parents and—”

“I can’t believe you went behind my back and talked to them about  _ my life _ !” Patrick yells over whatever stupid garbage is coming out of his dad’s face. “This is a—a ridiculous betrayal of—it’s just not your place, Dad! I’m not a kid!”

“If you’d let me  _ finish _ , Patrick,  you’d—”

“—just when we’re getting along, you go and do some kind of shit like this. Unbelievable! Let me out of the car, or I swear I’ll jump—”

“—you’re so much like your mother—”

“—you left Mom, you don’t get to talk about Mom—”

His dad slams the flat of his hand against the car horn, blaring the interior of the vehicle into shell-shocked silence.

“All I was going to say is, I was wrong about Pete,” his dad says into the brittle quiet. “I’m glad you’re spending time with him and the other boys. You seem—it seems like he makes you happy.”

“There is no ‘me and Pete,’” Patrick says through gritted teeth. He’s so angry he can’t look at his dad or god or anyone. He can’t believe he has to say these words to his  _ father _ . “We’re not—whatever we were doing, it’s over.”

“I’m sorry,” his dad says gravely. Patrick’s going to start punching him _ self _ in the face soon, just to get out of this situation. “Dale made it sound like he cares for you deeply.”

“Well, he doesn’t,” Patrick snaps. “Okay? You were right about the whole thing. Is that what you want to hear? Can we stop talking about this now?”

“Patster, I—”

“Can we STOP TALKING ABOUT THIS NOW?” Patrick repeats at top volume.

They drive in silence for a few minutes. Finally, his dad heaves a sigh and turns the radio back up. Patrick is so jangly and miserable with anger and awkwardness and hurt that he’s unsinkable. Nothing, not even playing music for a live audience, could make him feel worse than he does right now. Bring it on, he thinks grimly. For the first time in his life, he feels ready to get onstage.

 

They’re playing at 12:30, openers for the openers on a minor, out-of-the-way stage. It’s hours yet til the festival will be well-populated, hours til the attendees will be properly street-festival-level drunk and forgiving. Patrick doesn’t like the look of them out there, drifting like jackals, forming packs around the stage. It’s a really real stage: at least 4 feet off the ground with a metal barrier, a big canopy built on risers, towers of amps and forests of cables and a lighting rig that looms like SkyNet.

There are three steps up to the stage. He’d never be able to climb them, dragged down by the weight of his guitar strapped to his chest and his dread strapped somewhere deeper, if not for Pete. Pete and his hangdog face, those always-sad eyes set above a self-aware smirk, Pete in eyeliner and tight jeans or sweaty and shirtless or 18 in a bathing suit, Pete and the shit he said in Patrick’s bedroom and over the phone.

Pete, nowhere in fucking sight on this huge and terrifying stage. Even though he’s supposed to be the one who knows what he’s doing. Even though he’s the reason Patrick’s here. Even though he’s supposed to get Patrick through this mess of a public performance that he got Patrick into in the  _ first _ place.

Even though he knows how hard this is for Patrick. Even though he’s the only one on the planet who really gets how fucking  _ scared  _ Patrick feels right now.

The absence of Pete on that stage is the dashing of hope they might repair this fucking thing between them. Patrick climbs his anger in tandem with the stairs to the stage, his chest burning as he sets up his equipment. Fury makes his face flush. Can’t believe he ever wasted any time on this asshole. Can’t believe he wants on a deep, pre-rational level to waste even more. Maybe getting in a physical fight with Pete would sublimate some of the tension. Maybe he should just fucking choke the guy out.

Joe, fully clothed for what is possibly the first time all summer, runs soundcheck like a professional, like he’s done it a million times, and Patrick feels increasingly inadequate. These guys are the real deal, an actual band; why did Patrick ever think he could play with them? His guitar gets more and more out of tune as he becomes increasingly flustered. He’s close to losing his shit and just bolting when Andy comes up behind him and drums lightly across his tense shoulders with his taped sticks.

“Is there some cosmic law that states no more than two-thirds of you can have a shirt on at once or something?” Patrick asks unpleasantly, taking in Andy’s pale, partially tattooed but otherwise uncovered torso. It’s either saying something irritable or blurting out  _ I can’t do this _ , so Patrick goes for the crabby option.

Andy throws a comforting arm over him like he said the vulnerable thing instead, though. Patrick is too annoyed to receive kindness. Just being  _ offered _ kindness pisses him off even more. “Your armpit is on me,” Patrick grouses.

Andy squeezes him tight, laughing, “Oh good, you can absorb some of the sweat. I already smell terrible.”

Patrick swats him away, trying to escape the wet pit; a scuffle ensues. He ends up laughing in spite of himself. But Andy’s not so distracting that he doesn’t noticing the small crowd starting to swell around the stage, attracted by movement like a small horde of zombies. He also does not fail to notice the way Pete  _ still _ hasn’t bothered to show up, even though their set starts in—fuck—15 minutes. Patrick tries not to think about who Pete’s probably losing track of time with right now. The girl from the roof? The waitress from the pancake diner? Some other cuter-than-Patrick rando?

“You’re clenching up again,” Andy observes, pointing to Patrick’s jaw. “I meant what I said last week, about how being onstage was really hard for me at first. It’s still not, like, my favorite thing.”

“How did you, um, get used to it?” Patrick asks. It’s all he can do not to add,  _ asking for a friend. _

Andy shrugs. “I love drumming. I’m good at it. All I’ve ever wanted to do is be in a band—can’t imagine life without it. That matters more to me than feeling uncomfortable. Plus—drums are in the back. No one can even see me with you blocking the view!”

“You know, for a second you were almost making me feel better.”

Andy laughs. That sweaty arm comes back up around Patrick’s shoulders, only this time he doesn’t push it away. “For real, though, Pete’s famous for making a spectacle of himself onstage. I’ve got a feeling he’s gonna step it up since he knows you’re nervous. No one’s even going to glance at you or me.”

Patrick tries to be comforted by that, he really does. It’s mostly the flare of annoyance at the thought of Pete Wentz doing  _ anything _ that helps quell his nerves, though. “Did he tell you I get stage fright?” Patrick asks in a low voice.

Because he’s just overall really shitty at being comforting, Andy laughs again and heads for his kit to make final adjustments. “The people on the International Space Station know you get stage fright, Patrick. You’re sweating through your t-shirt and all you’ve done is tune up. It is very obvious.”

Patrick looks down in horror at the spreading sweat rings blooming from the armpits of his lucky orange t-shirt. He’s even got a damp line rising in the middle of his chest:  _ boob sweat _ . It’s already sodden under his guitar strap. The stage is  _ shaded _ . Sunlight is not touching any part of his body.  There is no excuse for any of this.

His courage begins to quail in his chest again. No sooner has it flickered, though, than the promised spectacle appears on the horizon: Pete, dressed like the living hyperbole of a folk singer. He’s in high-waist flare-leg denim, a fringed brown vest, an open pink paisley short sleeve shirt. He’s pasted a long, bristly false mustache to his upper lip. He’s wearing brown aviators that look just exactly like Patrick’s dad’s. He’s holding a garish guitar strap that looks like it’s made of couch upholstery, clearly intending to sling it across his chest. He looks completely fucking ridiculous.

“Hey hey, sunflowers and songbirds! Who’s ready to get folked up?” he calls out, approaching the stage, so stupid it’s cool.

Patrick’s heart flutters, just for one treacherous beat. Then the anger floods in, obliterating it. Because Pete didn’t show up alone.

Tagging along behind him is a thin brunette woman in a sundress. She’s at least a decade older than Patrick, which he takes as an affront in every way—like Pete’s trying to demonstrate all the reasons Patrick is unsuitable as a sex partner in one no-nonsense package. Patrick comforts himself by thinking that they make a stupid looking pair, 1970s Pete and this prim chin-length bob woman, but it’s not like  _ he  _ made any more sense next to Pete—chubby, long-haired, pink-kneed, prone to sunburn. A boy. A young one, awkward and unstylish.

Okay, scratch that. He comforts himself by thinking about how soon he’ll be in California, starting over again. As soon as they play their last note today, he has no reason to see Pete Wentz ever again. That’s a good thing. That’s what he  _ wants _ . Really.

“You made it,” Pete says to him in flat surprise, shouldering into his bass and not looking up. He needs to move nearer to Patrick than he seems willing to in order to plug his instrument into his amp. Noticing, Patrick moves even closer to the amp, under the pretense of limbering up with pre-show lunges. Pete moves towards and then away in small, stilted movements, like he’s bumping into a forcefield.

Patrick’s heart twists and thunders and charges, a torrent of choking loss. He turns away from the amp abruptly and walks away from Pete, towards Joe’s side of the stage, as far as his various cords and cables will let him. Being a forcefield isn’t fun. He misses magnetism.

“You ready?” Joe asks. He bumps the neck of his guitar against Patrick’s. Patrick shakes his head, feeling too many things to speak. Perhaps sensing his panic, Joe promises, “After the set, we’re finding the empanada truck and getting three of everything. Maybe we’ll just rent out the whole truck for an hour and eat everything they can stuff and fry, okay? Just imagine the audience as empanadas, dabbed with  _ delicious  _ chimichurri. This doesn’t need to be any different than in my garage.”

“But there are  _ people _ here,” Patrick points out.

Joe shakes his head. “All I see are empanadas.”

Looking out, Patrick can see what feels like a million strangers, sober and expectant. He finds his dad in the crowd, holding a beer and chatting animatedly with the Wentzes and Pete’s date. She looks very comfortable. Not sweaty at all. Patrick’s guts are ice, his heart a clenched fist of fire. His fingers shake on his guitar strings. Will he even be able to apply enough pressure to play chords? When he opens his mouth to sing, and vomit comes out instead, will he be electrocuted by the microphone? He can’t believe he agreed to do this without even looking up whether vomit conducts electricity. He’s a total fucking amateur. He’s going to pass out. He’s going to die, probably.

He glances sideways at Pete, dressed like John Denver and staring grimly down at his bass. Patrick tries to find his anger, to remind himself of the shitty things Pete said to him, to find anything within himself that feels strong, unlike running.

Then Joe says, “Oh—one more thing. Minor change to the setlist. We’re closing with your song.”

Patrick opens his mouth to say  _ what? _ and  _ never _ and  _ ABSOLUTELY FUCKING NOT _ and yak, probably, but he doesn’t get the chance. Because Pete steps up to the microphone and drawls, “Hey guys, great to be here with you this afternoon. I’m not here to waste a lot of your time, so let me just say: we’re Not Folking Around and these are our songs!”

Andy counts off the lead-in to their first song. Patrick misses his cue but Joe picks it up, and then Pete’s coming in with the bassline, and Patrick’s mouth is cracking open around the microphone and only wheezing is coming out, and then Pete nudges him in the shoulder and he’s so jolted by Pete’s touch, even after everything, that words just start pouring off his tongue. His fingers stumble into action only a few measures late and it’s happening, somehow. He’s singing. They’re performing. They’re playing a folk song. Patrick is in a  _ band _ .

 

Somehow, the world does not end, and the set goes on. They do Bob Dylan, Cat Stevens, Tracy Chapman. They are shaky, uneven, not especially skilled. The crowd starts to get thinner. Patrick’s voice gets stronger as he settles in, beginning to trust in himself, his instincts. He knows when to push a note and when to back down. He can relax into the music, just as he always has. Andy will be there, backing him. Joe will save him with guitar and vocals both if he should falter. Pete—Pete will—

Pete will be in the corner of his eye, always, distracting him. Burning at him like nips of hot oil, like something sticky from a wound. 

And Pete’s date will be in the crowd. Watching. Fuckable, wanted.

Yeah.

Patrick sets his jaw. Patrick plays.

 

As the set wears on, Joe runs interference between him and Pete so effortlessly, Patrick wonders how many guys in the band Pete has seduced and then rejected before him. But Patrick doesn’t wonder it for long, can’t: because when the music starts to build, when they’ve finished their wobbly token effort to play some folk hits and start their first real song, everything changes. He becomes someone entirely new.

 

They get stronger, as they start playing songs most of the band has known for more than a week: their originals, their garage-bred pride and joy, the songs they hope to sail by, to use as compass points leading them to their fortune. Confident, Pete and Joe both get flashier. Joe shows off a deadly kick-spin; Pete drops to the stage and does a horribly distracting thing with his hips, a motion Patrick recognizes not just from Joe’s garage but also from a tumbling handful of frantic, stolen moments of intimacy. The energy of the show, the stage, the lukewarm but heady feedback of a live audience—he is feeling enough brand-new blood-rush feelings that he can’t stand the sight of Pete’s hips writhing and rocking in those tight flared jeans. He turns away from Pete, sings harder, his own sweat stinging his eyes, his heart riding high in his chest.

He feels—something bigger than he has ever known the word  _ happy _ to entail. He feels it raw and living within him, coursing like sunlight, like glitter-flung stars the way they look in skies far from light-choked cities. Like universes moving under his skin.

Like being with Pete, being remade and released under his trembling lips and fingertips. Like bigger than that, more saturated, richer, louder, brighter,  _ more _ .

Like the difference between  _ living  _ and  _ alive _ . Patrick is dynamic and burning, a verb for the first time in his entire life. This is the feeling, the reason, the  _ joy _ of music—blown up. Set free. This is the full potential of the small, private, plenipotent thing he’s been in love with for years.

This is Patrick unleashed.

 

By the time they reach their last song—Patrick’s song, the one he adapted to be playable by this four-piece, the one he welded into the shape of this raw, glowing garage band out of his own clean composition—he discovers through a fresh jolt of anxiety that he’s disappeared into the process, started to relax. This: his own melody, his own lyrics, a splinter chipped off his own heart and wrapped in song—this is precious. This is  _ frightening _ . 

Or maybe it’s not. Maybe there’s not even time to be scared. Pete’s saying into Patrick’s mic, “Our next song, our last song, was written by our very own guest star Patrick Stump, a visiting musician out of Michigan, the only real genius I’ve ever met and, hands down, the cutest person I’ve ever kissed.” Patrick’s face is flaming, his heart juddering, his body drenched in adrenaline sweat. Pete leans in, smacks a kiss to Patrick’s stunned cheek, and adds, “You’re the first audience to ever hear it performed. Treasure it, ‘cuz this kid’s made of gold.”

Patrick fits his fingers into the shape of familiar chords, too overwhelmed to know what else to do, and waits for Joe’s cue. Joe strums and Patrick answers. He brings his lips close to the mic, to where Pete’s have been.

He begins to sing.

 

Pete, who has hovered nearer and nearer throughout the set, is close enough now to get hit with Patrick’s sweat. Close enough to press his face near Patrick’s cheek, to sing the chorus together into Patrick’s mic:  _ Last night I saw my world explode _ . To sing it again and again, voice aching and  _ felt _ , with significance in his eyes Patrick can’t stand. To lean in quick during the bridge and say into Patrick’s neck, “Last night I  _ made  _ my world explode. Last night was not what I wanted. You are. You. You.”

These words are specific and vague, containing an overwhelm of almost no information. Patrick can’t process them. He pushes Pete off him with a blissy stage smile and a middle finger, returns to his purpose and his work, sings until his lungs give out, until this song, his song, carries them and their set all the way home.


	11. Chapter 11

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this chapter is brought to you especially by the 5 Seconds of Summer song Youngblood, which can be found [on the fic playlist](https://open.spotify.com/user/marvelgirl238/playlist/3gcb1HSwSWvjNb6r5l66Nx)
> 
> next week: san francisco.
> 
> happy friday to all my lovelies out there

 

Everyone’s so happy after—smiling and laughing, jostling each other with the giddy silver afterburn of stage exhilaration. Last time Patrick felt this way, he ended up significantly naked, exposed from throat to thigh, in a public park with Pete Wentz. In some ways it feels just as otherworldly and miraculous to be standing in the empanada line with his friends as it did spilling himself like starlight into Pete’s better-than-imagination, better-than-real hand.

Pete—Pete’s at his elbow, by his side. Pete’s grinning and ridiculous in his folk clothes. His shirt is open so far that sometimes, when the angle’s right, Patrick can see his pierced nipple. The lines of their bodies touch as everyone laughs at the hypothetical scheme for the future of the band Joe is spinning. Patrick does not pull away, does not think about how he’s leaving. Tonight, he keeps his body here. Next to Pete’s.

 

Patrick has just bitten into an empanada that spills meat and grease down his chin when his dad and Pete’s date come strolling up to the food truck like a vision from one of Patrick’s stress dreams. He has no napkin, of course he doesn’t, just two hands full of fried meat pouches. He ends up rubbing grease into his inner elbow, not really  _ removing _ it from his skin so much as spreading it onto  _ more  _ of his skin.

He’s a mess.

“Patrick! It’s so good to finally meet you,” says the date. Up close, she’s older than Patrick first realized—whatever age comes with semi-permanent crinkles in the freckled skin around her eyes and glittering shock of grey in her chin-length black hair. He can’t help but side-eye Pete, who has just shoved an entire spinach pastry into his mouth at once. She’s a pretty woman, and Pete’s  _ Pete _ , but—he doesn’t get it.

“Finally?” Patrick echoes, his greasy mouth still full of food. He chews inelegantly. He wants to the opposite of impress her.

Her warm, pleasant smile doesn’t falter. She laughs, a gentle bell-like sound, shaped round like joy. Patrick hates it. “Of course! I’ve heard so much about you from Pete and your dad. Your live performance is so different stylistically from your tapes, I’d love to pick your brain about it. We don’t typically get to hear how prospective students perform in ensembles, how they’re able to adapt to and improvise with other musicians. Pete says you’ve only been playing with them for a week, correct? So I was especially interested in the give and take you had with the other guitar, the way you leaned on the rhythm section and let them lead changes, rather than dominating or overplaying them—”

“What is  _ happening _ right now?” Patrick interrupts crassly. But it’s a valid question: she’s so excited she’s talking with her hands, waxing on about Patrick’s playing when she should be cooing over Pete’s. And what’s this business about prospective students and his tapes?

His dad blanches at his rudeness. Pete’s date’s smile falters at last. Pete, in the corner of Patrick’s field of vision, looks distinctly guilty.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t introduce myself,” the sundress woman says, graceful to the last. Patrick feels hugely petty about it. “My name is Steph Cardin. I’m chair of the admissions committee for the Bienen School of Music at Northwestern.”

Patrick’s heart drops like a stone, knocked clean out of his chest. “But—you came with Pete,” he sputters.

“Yes,” Dr. Cardin agrees. “He invited me to your set. Convinced me I’d be a fool to miss the chance to hear you play.”

Patrick opens his mouth to ask  _ why _ at the same time Pete chimes in, “It’s an audition, Rick. A second chance. Your dad helped me set it up.”

_ But we’re fighting,  _ Patrick wants to say.  _ But you were such a dick to me today. _ Then he thinks about how nursing that anger at Pete got him here, got him on stage, got him through the worst of his performance anxiety when other kinds of support failed. He thinks of Pete’s absences, his secret phone calls, the way Pete literally pushed him into reconciliation the night his dad  _ coincidentally  _ showed up at band practice.

Confronted with the enormity of the things Pete may have done for him this summer, unable to process their implications, Patrick does what he always does. He freaks out.

“I’m going to SFCM,” he says. His voice is too loud. He sounds like, is, an ass. “I don’t want to go to Northwestern.”

Dr. Cardin’s smile is definitely strained now. “Good thing I haven’t offered you admission yet,” she says mildly. “I’m glad to have finally seen you play, in any event. The committee was quite impressed with the recordings you submitted. San Francisco will be lucky to have you.”

She makes her excuses and wanders off to enjoy more skillfully delivered folk music. Patrick is left shell-shocked and waiting to be yelled at by his dad.

But his dad embraces him instead. “You were amazing up there, Patster. A natural performer. Steph’s right, SFCM is lucky. I’ll see you at my set tonight, okay? Save you a spot right up front. You boys have fun.”

Joe and Andy have conveniently wandered away during these exchanges, so for a moment Patrick is alone with Pete. Pete and his one remaining empanada. Patrick wants to say  _ thank you _ , or  _ I’m sorry _ , or  _ why did you do all this for me _ , or  _ why did you do all this for me when you don’t even want to fuck me _ , or  _ what am I to you, really? what are we to each other?  _ Patrick wants to say anything but  _ goodbye _ . 

Patrick wants July to start over again, to live nothing but these few weeks on loop for the rest of his life, sinking deep into the creases between days, wearing them so thin with use they rupture and all the light spills out, greedy and clinging like oil, to soak into his skin brilliant. He wants to gorge himself on these moments with Pete, to master them: to wring every drop of affection out of them. Pete is beside him but Patrick already feels like a desert, thirsty and cracked, hallucinating the feel of water, Pete’s eyes on the horizon always only a mirage.

Before he can figure out how to translate any of this into words, let alone get those words out of his mouth, Pete intervenes. “Is that one of the bacon ones?” he asks. He points to the last empanada. Patrick nods: it is. “Can I have it?” asks Pete.

Helpless, Patrick nods again. Pete plucks the pastry from his hand, overstuffs with mouth with it, and garbles out, “Fnnngks.” Then he strolls merrily over to the picnic table Joe and Andy have staked out, exactly like nothing at all has passed between them, like none of his machinations implied he might possibly still want Patrick to stay, might possibly still want Patrick at all, like he didn’t speak a single word into Patrick’s neck on stage, like he doesn’t want to hear what  _ Patrick _ has to say about any of this at all.

 

The whole night feels like a drawn-out goodbye, and it makes Patrick ache from the space behind his eyes to the roots of his teeth, from his cuticles to the smallest bones in his toes. Every joke feels overly significant, and they all laugh a little too long at each punchline, like none of them know if it’s the last time they’ll laugh together. They cruise the food trucks, wander in and out of jazz performances, lay in the grass and gather sunburns. Patrick keeps letting his hand inch closer and closer to Pete’s, near enough for the other boy to hold it, but Pete never does. Patrick, feeling spiky and worn in the aftermath of his big performance-slash-panic-attack, concentrates on breathing in and out. On telling himself nothing’s ending.

Joe smokes up before Patrick’s dad’s set and this time, Patrick takes him up on the offer. Pete and Andy abstain, and the sweet-skunk stink of it climbs high into the late July air and mingles with a thousand other strains of pot. They’re surrounded by people their parents’ ages and every one of them is high. 

Playing in Patrick’s head on loop is Pete’s face, unreadable in his shadowy bedroom, saying,  _ I’m sorry you got the wrong idea. I’m sorry I got the wrong idea.  _ It’s echoed by the maybe-imaginary murmur of Pete onstage, hard to make out over all the other sound and roaring blood, saying-or-not,  _ Last night was not what I wanted _ . 

So he smokes, and discovers that marijuana makes him feel floaty and light, like he could trip around on his tiptoes and never stumble, like the ground is soft and a good place for laying, like nothing is so complicated after all, like he can laugh or he can be silent, like the universe is much to be contemplated, like time is rather silly in its insistence on linearity after all.

“We make a good band,” Joe tells him, throwing an arm over his shoulders and squeezing him, touching him in all the easy ways Pete is not, not, not. Patrick leans back into his friend and they press against the barrier, like they’re going to mosh to his dad’s folk songs up here. The night feels extra-bright, hazy but neon, like every breath is underscored. 

“Come back anytime,” Andy adds, throwing his arm around Patrick from the other side. “You decide you want to move to Chicago? Our couch is yours. You decide you want to usurp Peter as our vocalist? Also yours.” 

Joe adds, “And come to your dad’s for winter break, okay? We’ll do a Hannukah show.”

The word  _ yes  _ waits behind Patrick’s teeth. He only wants Pete to say what they’re saying, to invite him back, to just one more time ask him to stay. Third time magic, third time binding. But Pete doesn’t ask. Pete smiles at the clinging three of them, his face soft and familiar with fondness that is already tingeing the color of nostalgia, of long-ago, of as-good-as-forgotten, says, “We were pretty unstoppable together, weren’t we?”

Patrick’s dad takes the stage. The crowd of old stoners around them erupts, reminding Patrick viscerally of the way fame would feel, of what it will mean for him to perform as a solo artist, if ever he does. The events of this day, of this summer, fade dreamlike, yielding to the loudness of this moment. To the reality that he doesn’t even feel comfortable this close to the front, in the press of a crowd, knowing how many rows of people are behind him. His friend’s arms around him are the only reason he doesn’t flee, just from this—just from spectating. That’s a fucking metaphor for his own life if ever he heard one.

Patrick, feeling spinny and sad, leans his head on Joe’s shoulder. He sways with his friends, connected to them for the last time. He doesn’t let himself think about afters.

 

For Patrick’s last night in Illinois, his dad puts together a taco bar, makes his famous margaritas, and invites over everyone Patrick’s met in the time he’s been here. Joe presides over the record player, digging though Patrick’s dad collection for Patrick’s favorite pop records, playing them one after another with no regard whatsoever for the vibe or mood of the party as a whole. Patrick gets drunk on the atmosphere of love as much as the tequila. He doesn’t remember the last time he felt so at home, here in this house that isn’t his, with his noncustodial parent and these people who a month ago were strangers. His dad keeps hugging him every time they get near each other; so does Dale Wentz. Andy, who made the trip from Chicago to the ‘burbs without complaint, even brings vegan cheesecake from his favorite diner.

“It’s amazing to me, the man you’ve grown into over the years,” his dad announces after the cake is cut. “I remember you running into my arms, snot and blood everywhere, the day you busted your eyebrow open sledding—you were tiny, four or five. And now suddenly you’re a person, and not just any person, but a bold, impressive one who is  _ going places _ , Patster, I mean it. I know talent when I hear it. So does Pete.” He points at Pete, on the opposite side of the room from Patrick, whose face colors immediately. “Why else would he go to so much trouble to get that audition set up for you? And Joe, who tells me every day that I should ground you to Chicago so you have no choice but to join his band.” Joe beams with pride. Patrick is so embarrassed he’s going to melt into the floor tiles. Patrick’s dad takes a hearty gulp of margarita and finishes, “I just want to say how proud of you I am. Getting to know you this summer has been—well, I’m going to treasure it. Like Pete said: you’re made of gold, my boy.” 

“I’ll drink to that,” Pete’s father says, raising his own margarita in a toast and mercifully ending the overwhelming outpouring of love and accolades. Everyone raises their glasses, sloshing lime and liquor in their attempt to knock their cups against Patrick’s. Patrick drinks, pretending not to have tears in his eyes. 

It gets worse when his dad presents him with an ancient, velvety guitar case; inside it nestles his most beautiful guitar, the acoustic Ibanez with the pearl inlays.

“Dad, I can’t accept this,” Patrick protests, even while his fingers stroke it greedily. Gorgeous, flashy, impeccably made, with the thickest throaty resonance of any acoustic Patrick’s ever played: he wants it, of course he does.

“It’s my luck,” his dad says. “There’s nothing I’d rather send you out into the world with than that.”

Then Patrick  _ really  _ can’t speak, so he takes a choking-hazard-big gulp of marg instead. He does choke, a little, when Joe and Andy converge on him in a crushing hug.

It’s not til late that evening, when most of the party has dispersed and he’s snuck out onto the back porch for a moment of air, that he has his goodbye with Pete. Even without turning around, when he hears the pneumatic pop of the sliding glass door open and then close again, he knows who it will be. This is the first time they’ve been alone together since the empanada truck. The festival was only two days ago, but in the silence between them since, it feels much longer.

It feels like all the endings and goodbyes have already happened, like they’re just now getting hit with a bullet fired days ago. It feels like there’s nothing to say.

“You can see right into our pool from here,” Pete says softly, which is technically new information that has not been said. “You ever watch me swim? All rippling shoulder muscles and pecs, indistinguishable from Michael Phelps?”

“Uhhh,” stumbles Patrick, demonstrating how he’s exactly as big a mess as he was when he got here nearly a month ago.

Pete’s canines catch the light as he turns to Patrick, grinning. “I know how concerned you get about voyeurism,” he teases. “Remember the first real thing you ever said to me, by the mailbox that night?”

“No,” says Patrick. “And neither do you.”

The version of him that was horrified by the idea of Pete seeing him masturbate would have curled up and died, if you’d told him all the other things Pete would see him do before summer’s end. All the things he and Pete would do to each other. The things they would stop short of doing, stop short of saying—those make Patrick want to curl up and die so much more, now, than any embarrassment on the visible light spectrum ever could. This version of Patrick feels cheated, in a way. He’s seen enough teen movies to know how he’s supposed to spend the last night of his summer romance. Even Sandy and Danny Zuko did it on the beach, didn’t they? And she wore  _ cardigans _ . This, the two of them on his dad’s porch with a party winding down inside, not even touching—this isn’t how their story ends.

“Thanks, Pete. For—all of it.”

Gazing into his own backyard, Pete says, “I don’t know how to say goodbye to you.”

Internally, Patrick is screaming. Goodbyes are stupid, and he doesn’t want this one to go like this. But there’s nothing to fix, with Pete. They were never serious, never September-real. They were summer only, temporary as tan lines, as sidewalk chalk, as sparklers and water balloons. They’re not going to date long-distance, Illinois to California, two thousand miles and five years apart. They’re not going to hold each other close in the chill of winter break and kiss in Cancun come March. Patrick might not even ever  _ see _ Pete again: even if he does come back to his dad’s next summer, which he wasn’t planning to, who’s to say Pete would still be around?

No, this was lightning-strike magic: there and gone. One burning flash that electrified the skies, its brilliance contained entire within its fleetingness. That’s the only difference between lightning and a regular old fluorescent bulb, isn’t it? That’s why lightning’s special. It lights up only once. It doesn’t stick around.

So Pete says  _ I don’t know how to say goodbye to you _ , and Patrick’s heart cracks like a storm knifing through a violet sky, and he leans in and kisses Pete for the very last time: soft, sweet, there and gone. He says, “Like this.”

And he leaves. Without looking back, he goes inside. He doesn’t go upstairs, can’t face the windows, the thought of seeing Pete’s bedroom light turn on and then off again for the last time. He goes downstairs instead, to the recording booth. Only when he’s safe and soundproofed does he say the words out loud:

“Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye.”


	12. Chapter 12

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> happy friday, cats and kittens!
> 
> this week's chapter is brought to you by the song The Lost Boys by The Courtneys, the pete wentz anthem of our time. [check it out on the story playlist!](https://open.spotify.com/user/marvelgirl238/playlist/3gcb1HSwSWvjNb6r5l66Nx)
> 
> next week, the grand finale.

 

Patrick goes to the beach straight from the airport. He stands in the sand with his overstuffed duffel and three instrument cases, the cool clean heat of California blasting his skin with a striking absence of humidity. It’s August, and he’s left the swelter behind him.

The sea is unsettled, cascading ultramarine and choppy white against the shoreline. Bitten-rough cliffs jut into the tide; deep blue waves break open, throwing themselves against rock.

Patrick takes off his socks and sneakers, cuffs his jeans, and wades out into the surf. It’s warmer than it looks, easily 20 degrees toastier than Lake Superior would be in August. The sand is coarse under his feet, salt-squinting grains that crunch and cut beneath his weight.

The sun is hot, the water warm. The day glitters like broken glass.

It leaves him cold.

 

Patrick’s roommate turns out to be kind of an asshole. Not in the Pete way, either. This kid is—well—he’s very pretentious. Patrick thought  _ he _ was pretentious about music, but it turns out that Michigan pretentious is very different from California pretentious. 

The roommate introduces himself like this: “Hi I’m Brendon, all my friends call me Bren, but we don’t know which you are yet, do we? You do your best and I’ll let you know.” (Over the next few days Patrick will witness him introduce himself to no fewer than three other people the exact same way.) He’s two years younger than Patrick and already starting his second year at SFCM, so he’s clearly some kind of savant. His hair is very tall.

“I’m Patrick,” Patrick says. “Uhhh, my dad calls me Patster but please don’t do that.”

His luggage leaves sand on their living room floor. Brendon stares at it like he can’t believe what a rube he’s been saddled with. “I didn’t even know there were two Michigans,” Brendon says, when Patrick tries to explain his origin. “Is that like a Dakota situation?” Patrick tries to clarify that there’s only the one Michigan, just with two parts, but Brendon is bored and paying attention to something else pretty much before he’s finished with his own sentence. He doesn’t even seem to hear Patrick.

Brendon has a hairstyle, big gold-rimmed sunglasses, cuffed jeans and a tight white v-neck shirt. He is effortlessly cool in a slick, glitzy way, like late neon nights full of smeared street signs, hot desert highways, sweaty highball glasses, arching palm trees. Las Vegas cool, or so Patrick must assume, because he’s never been to Brendon’s midnight-glitter hometown. (A fact that stacks up along with other personal failings Brendon’s existence is making him aware of.) Brendon oozes stage presence and charisma, even in an apartment that is smaller and less glamorous than most strip motels. 

One of his equally intimidating and trendy friends, this one in a paisley shirt and leather newsboy cap, smokes a menthol cigarette boredly and does not help them move their furniture or boxes or suitcases at  _ all _ . No one asks if Patrick’s okay with Ryan smoking inside the apartment, which, for the record, he is not. Patrick learns quickly that Brendon thinks he knows everything, including the best furniture layout for their tiny apartment. The problem isn’t the floorplan, Patrick wants to say while Brendon complains to his friend that Patrick’s lack of dexterity is why this loveseat won’t fit where they’re trying to cram it. The problem is how much of his own stuff Brendon found it necessary to bring to a one-bedroom, pre-furnished apartment.

Patrick carefully tacks up the photos he’s brought from home above his narrow single bed in the room they’ll share. “So you’re like, a garage musician?” Brendon asks condescendingly while Patrick sticks up an overdeveloped polaroid of him and Joe (who is, of course, shirtless) draped over each other during a goofier moment of  band practice. Patrick goes ahead and ignores the little snort Brendon emits when he sees the newsprint Square Roots flier.

“Could you like, not smoke in here? I’m a vocalist,” Patrick says. Brendon and Ryan have their legs tangled together on the other bed, both attempting to blow smoke rings at the ceiling. 

“Are you?” Something about Ryan’s tone suggests he finds it unlikely Patrick is capable of anything. “What are all the instrument cases for, then?”

“I play a lot of things,” Patrick mumbles. He regrets asking.

“Me, too,” Brendon says laconically. “Have to play together sometime. Figure out who’s better.” He doesn’t sound like he thinks it will be much of a contest.

Patrick’s only just finished unpacking when more of Brendon’s friends start arriving. They come bearing alcohol, marijuana, loud music, expensive clothing designed to look like cast-offs. The apartment is too small to really escape them, their noise, their smoke. They’re friendly enough, or appear to be: when they invite Patrick to drink and dance, their smiles don’t ever seem to reach their eyes. It’s like he’s fallen into fairyland, or else a movie set: everything is turned up loud, the colors oversaturated, the air bleeding with how alive it’s all  _ meant to seem _ , but none of it’s what you think it is. Like biting into a juice-swollen fruit and tasting only the grit of ash. It looks better than real, but it’s not clear what it  _ is _ . Just impressionistic swirls of color and implication, affect and glamour, wax mannequins animated by your own desires.

Patrick has never felt so solidly Midwestern in his life.

There’s a lyric from one of Pete’s songs that he finds himself humming, while he lays awake late that night.  _ There’s a light on in Chicago, and I know I should be home _ .

“Would you  _ stop humming _ ,” Brendon groans from across the tiny bedroom. “Some of us are trying to  _ sleep _ .”

Patrick reminds himself he came to California to make all his dreams come true.  He’s going to figure it out. It will get better once classes start. 

 

It does not.

When he gets to his first class, it’s filled with Brendons: flashy haircuts, incomprehensibly trendy dumpster clothing, over-talented, under-impressed young people who would slit each others’ throats with a violin bow for a minor honor or ten seconds in the spotlight. The professor has them go around the room and name their most important musical influences, and Patrick is the only one who lists pop records. He sees several people roll their eyes. He feels increasingly blue-collar, unsophisticated, dumb. Kid from a town in Michigan with a population of 20,000, comes to San Francisco and thinks he knows anything about art? The wind cuts colder here than it ever did back north. He walks to and from his classes alone. In the first week he’s introduced to five different people who have concept albums and four who have had their own showcase performances.  _ Everyone _ has an agent. Several claim Elton John as a family friend. He tries to keep an open mind, but he doesn’t meet anyone like him. He pulls his hat lower and lower over his eyes and doesn’t meet anyone at all.

 

Whenever he tries to practice one of his instruments at home, either Brendon’s there sighing at him like he’s the least skilled buffoon of a musician anywhere on the West Coast, or it’s what the neighbors consider an indecent hour (anytime before noon, Patrick’s learning) and they pound on the wall til he stops. It doesn’t feel right anyway, even before the wall-pounding starts. It’s like—it’s like the music isn’t where he left it.

He needs enough space to find it again.

Patrick starts spending more and more evenings alone in the soundproofed practice cubicles they have on campus instead of going home. He stays til the lights go off and the custodians show up. He tries to slide inside the keyboard like he’s always done, to blast himself brassy with his trumpet, to bruise his feelings out on his drum pads, to rip his fingers up on guitar strings. None of it feels the way he remembers. He searches and searches for the feeling, for the need, for the reason he came to music school in the first place. It’s not there.

He rifles through his chest, arms pulpy red to the elbow with his own insides, can’t find his heart.

Can’t find it anywhere.

One night, when his favorite custodian knocks on the glass door to his usual cube to let him know it’s time to pack up, Patrick emerges from his cocoon of dissonant sound and dissatisfaction to find someone waiting outside. It’s a black kid he recognizes from one of his theory classes, one who nodded appreciatively when Patrick brought up how Michael Jackson used his voice to compose every element of his tracks during a lecture. 

“Sounding good in there,” the kid says, nodding at the booth.

Patrick clutches his keyboard case to his chest, horrified. “You could hear me? Oh god, I’m sorry I was so loud—”

The kid cocks his head, half-smiling, and presses a button on the intercom outside the door. Patrick realizes only when the kid presses it that one of these buttons is labeled  _ Listen _ . He never worried about the intercom because he hasn’t had anyone to communicate with while he’s inside the little booth. Turns out people could have been listening to him this whole time, and him with headphones on, eyes closed, back turned, trying to find his way back into his own world. He feels queasy.

“I’m Travie. You’re Patrick, right?”

Patrick nods. He tenses without meaning to, prepared for some cutting comment or another about his technique. Instead, Travie says, “Heard you humming in there, harmonizing with your guitar? You sounded good. We should sing together sometime.”

Patrick senses a trap, but he’s not sure where. Might as well find it by blundering in facefirst. “I haven’t met anyone nice,” he blurts out. “People in California are supposed to be so happy? But everyone here is an asshole.”

To Patrick’s tremendous relief, Travie laughs sharply. “Yeah they are. Music kids are the worst. That’s why you and me should stick together—we’re the only ones at this school with good taste.”

Meeting Travie is all that gets him through to September.

 

When Patrick gets the acceptance letter from Northwestern, he doesn’t know what he’s supposed to do with it. He sits on the edge of his bed and slowly tears the letter into strips. He stuffs them down to the bottom of the trash can. He’s not going to think about it. Really. He’s not.

 

He’s homesick, but not for the town or set of walls that made up his home for so long. He’s homesick for summer, for a town outside Chicago that he’s not from, that he never lived in. He misses a band he was never in, songs that he didn’t write, friends that weren’t ever really his.

He calls Joe. It’s as close as he can get.

“Joe’s not at home. Do you want to leave a message?” Mr. Trohman asks.

Patrick can’t picture a Joe that’s not shirtless in his garage, playing guitar all day, sweaty in the shade. Patrick can’t picture Joe in September.

He doesn’t leave a message, now that he’s not sure who exactly it’s for.

 

September, and the day of Patrick’s first in-class performance is coming on swiftly. He’s spent hours practicing and repracticing his strongest piece on his strongest instrument: Switchblades and Infidelity, guitar and voice, the song they closed their set with at Square Roots. He can’t get it to sound  _ whole _ . It was a complete composition, before he modified it to play with Pete and Andy and Joe. But it’s like now that he’s heard it played by four, felt it from inside a band, had other voices backing his own, the solo version sounds—hollow. Travie assures him it does not, but Travie wasn’t there, in July. Travie doesn’t hear whatever the thing is that’s missing.

Patrick still can’t find his fucking heart.

Patrick gets more nauseous-nervous with each passing day. In a fit of panic the night before, he decides he ought to play the song acoustic. He ought to play it on his dad’s guitar.

He pulls out the dusty, velvet case. He hasn’t touched the Ibanez since the night his dad gave it to him. Somehow, he couldn’t bear to. It’s like the night he got it is trapped in the case, all the potential and promise and light of that evening wrapped up in the instrument. He feels like if he looses the guitar here and lets it sound in this dry, ionized ocean air, its tone will change. The memories will flow out of it, the possibilities contracting sharply til all that’s left is reality. If he pulls out this guitar, when he plays it, when he hears its voice, he will know that San Francisco is not the thing that changed his life. Maybe it would have been, if it had had the chance. But something else changed him first.

Someone else changed him first.

The night before his first-ever graded performance, the one for the snide classmates who will hate it (Travie, who’s performing a vocal hip hop piece he wrote, will be Patrick’s only ally in there), the night Patrick isn’t going to get any sleep anyway, he decides it is time to take up his dad’s guitar.

He opens the case, revealing the Ibanez even gaudier and lovelier than he remembered, and an envelope falls out. It’s unmarked, probably something sentimental from his dad. He pulls the guitar onto his lap, stroking its side and getting used to the way the weight sits different than his Gibson, and tears the envelope’s flap.

He unfolds a sheet of paper covered in cramped, hectic caps. He’d recognize the hand anywhere: it’s what crowded the sheets of lyrics he was given to learn in preparation for the festival. It’s Pete’s.

Patrick can’t breathe. Patrick can only read.

 

_ summer is my skin, like the sunshinesweat settles over bone, becomes the new see-through plastic wrap i’m barely contained in. summer is a translucent film. pierce it, & i’ll spill out. i’ll scatter, tumbled like a handful of blown stars, like dandelion seeds. my blood will be the color of you. _

_ summer is opulent and lazy, self-indulgent & boiling with possibility. with expectations. it rambles manic with energy, marching the streets at 3am, the same color as porch lights on hot nights. it is the restless swelter. there’s a bomb on the bus and if i slow down we all die, so i go all day and all night because i’m greedy for it. the sun shines back out of me. _

_ summer is air-the-same-temperature-as-the-inside-of-your-body lushness, the sense of spilling, long ambling twilights, walking for hours because everywhere you are is a good place to be, the slow spread of starlight, always the smell of charcoal and hose water from someone’s backyard somewhere, fireflies rising over prairie grass, and you. _

_ you are the june gloom and the air raid skies of fourth of july. you are swollen, bitter august. you are corn on the cob, the ice cream man, sweat running down temples. you are every lickable thing. i have never had a summer like you before. ive never been with a boy before. i’m less like you than either of us thought. you really  _ are _ the thing i thought i was made of. you are the realest, brightest-shining thing ive ever seen. you’re glitter  & magic & blinding gold sunlight & running through sprinklers & driving on the interstate with the windows down & every song ive ever loved & being too hot to sleep in a musty tent & watching the stars come out & swinging on a playground in the dead of night because it makes you feel like an astronaut & sleeping in, lazy blue-green summer gloom, because there’s nowhere to be that you aren’t already.  _

_ i love you. _

_ i hope california is what you’re looking for. _

_ xoxo pete _

 

So Patrick gets on a plane.


	13. Chapter 13

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _making out inside airports, sleeping with you for the memories_
> 
> For those of you who have been here from the beginning and those of you who are just joining us: thank you for reading, for reaching out, for supporting me, for coasting into summer alongside me and these boys. This story, like everything else I write, is for you. I wrote this story while falling in love with a summer boy, and I hope you can feel it. Every fucking one of you deserves a happily ever after. This chapter and the summer are sponsored by the song Yellow by Kevin Abstract. 
> 
>  
> 
> [I'll play myself out.](https://open.spotify.com/user/marvelgirl238/playlist/3gcb1HSwSWvjNb6r5l66Nx)

 

Patrick gets on a plane and knows where he’s going: ORD, Chicago O’Hare. It is good that he knows this, that he has a boarding pass he can hold in his hand that tells it to him, because otherwise? Otherwise Patrick has no fucking idea what he’s doing.

He’s going to Chicago, where he will—what? Show up on Pete’s doorstep? Say _um I got your letter six weeks late and cross-continental flight seemed like the most appropriate way to respond to mail_ ? Hold a boombox over his head playing Savage Garden’s perennial hit, _I Love You Always Forever_ , and confess to Pete the secret burning words he has buried in his heart: chicka-cherry-cola?

And what’s his plan for after that? He didn’t buy a round trip ticket. For one thing, his bank account only had $239 in it and he did the best he could with that; for another, more significant thing, the thought of returning to San Francisco—to the apartment that is thick with cigarette smoke and his cool roommate’s scorn—to classes where he must listen to snobby know-it-alls with perfect golden tans deride the artists that made him want to make music in the first place—to the ruthless, cutthroat college where he has only one friend and none of the happiness he was counting on? The very thought of all that makes his skin shiver, his guts burn. Like he’s freezing to death and melting from the inside at once.

He doesn’t want to go back.

Patrick’s running. He’s running right now and he knows that. (Does that make it any better?) He’s running away from running away, maybe. Because he ran all the way to California to find himself, and what he found was the same messy, scared, uncertain kid he’d been in Illinois and Michigan and anywhere else on the globe. Now Patrick thinks that maybe that’s the person he’ll find anywhere he runs to. Now Patrick thinks that maybe the issue isn’t _finding_ himself, it’s learning to live and thrive with the shitty, unsatisfying self he’s already found.

He thought that if he went somewhere totally new, he’d find something new in himself. And he was mostly right. He was just wrong about where.

_There’s a light on in Chicago and I know I should be home._

So he gets on a plane. He knows where he’s going. He doesn’t know what the fuck he’ll do when he gets there. He’s got a four hour flight to figure it out.

 

Patrick falls asleep before take-off and wakes up as they’re landing. He arrives in Illinois groggy, disoriented, and with even less of a plan than he left California with, if that’s possible. For example, he doesn’t even know how he’s leaving the airport. He supposes he’ll take a cab, if he can figure out where the hell he wants it to take him.

Travie is the only person who even knows Patrick is doing this. He didn’t call anyone, not even his dad. He didn’t, doesn’t, know how to explain himself. He read a letter. This is what he needs to do.

Travie hugged him, dropping him off at the airport. He was grinning this wide, infectious smile. It made Patrick feel like this was not such a disastrously bad idea. Patrick wishes Travie were here now, to smile at him like that again; because as he troops off the plane, stiff-necked and totally directionless, the idea that brought him here is feeling less and less good.

Patrick is working very hard not to think about the reason he came here. Not to think about Pete. Does he need flowers, to show up at the Wentzes’? Should he wear a tie? If he _does_ boombox it, what’s the best song for him to play? _Beat It_ kind of sends the opposite message of what he intends, doesn’t it?

Patrick has a loose working plan when he arrives at baggage claim carousel 8. It’s vague in some key points, but it involves hailing a cab and giving them Pete’s address, so it moves him in the necessary direction, at least. If Pete’s not at home, maybe Dale Wentz will make him a cup of tea and chat casually, like this is a planned visit, like all of his behaviors to this point have been totally rational and wise.

Patrick is rehearsing lines in his head, none of which are terribly sexy or suave, holding his guitar case and waiting for his bag. He doesn’t know why he brought the Ibanez, exactly—he’s not planning to win Pete over by serenade—but he remembers his dad saying the guitar was his luck. Patrick doesn’t want to use that luck on a public performance of an inferior version of his song for a bunch of smug pop-haters who won’t get it. He wants to use it on—on—flying impulsively across the country to tell Pete _It meant something, it was real, to me it was real_. He wants to use his luck on Pete.

So Patrick is testing out opening lines, muttering to himself at baggage claim like any emotionally stable adult, when his eyes fall on a kid in a hoodie playing a Nintendo DS across the way. He sits on baggage carousel 7, scuffed metal and a defunct conveyor belt, with black bangs flopping in his eyes, his lip bitten in concentration. Patrick’s heart stutter-stops. While he stares, Pete looks up from his game, does a little four-finger wave, and flashes a tiny smile.

Fuck his luggage. Patrick hops over other peoples’ suitcases, dodges through families of touristing San Franciscans, trips and nearly breaks his neck on some dude’s laptop bag. Every time other travelers obscure his view of Pete, he’s worried Pete will disappear like a mirage in the desert. When he does finally reach the other boy, he’s winded.

“What are you doing here?” he demands gracelessly.

Pete holds up one finger and plays through to a stopping point before he finally flips the DS shut and looks up at Patrick. “Picking you up from the airport,” he says. “Duh.”

All the partially-scripted declarations Patrick has been working on die on the little treadmills inside his brain. Pete is even better-looking than he remembered. He can smell Pete’s hair products from here, coconut shampoo and something spicy. Those big, clear brown eyes shine up at him, full of bronze light under a worried brow. “I didn’t tell you I was coming,” he says. This seems obvious to him, but maybe Pete needs to be told? “I didn’t tell anyone.”

“Then you should talk to your friend about boundaries. Travie, I think? He called and told me what flight you were on.”

Patrick’s going to have to buy a return ticket after all, just so he can strangle and/or kiss Travie McCoy.

“You’re blushing,” Pete tells him helpfully, as if he might not be aware his face is the temperature of Mordor. “I don’t think you’re in any position to ask why _I’m_ here, by the way. You’re the one who made all that fuss about moving to California. So why are strange boys calling to herald your coming when we haven’t talked in over a month?”

There are too many answers to this question, and all of them are embarrassing. Patrick tries to say all of them at once. “Summer ended. My feelings—didn’t. I want to kiss you in the fall and the winter and the spring, too. My songs don’t feel right anymore; I keep waiting for you or Joe or Andy to join in. My shit sounds worse without you. I hate California. And I got your letter last night.”

“What letter?”

Patrick’s stomach sinks. Does Pete write letters like that so often he doesn’t remember it? “You must have written it before I left,” he says slowly. “The one about summer? It was in my guitar case?”

“You mean the letter where I told you I loved you?” Pete asks without any sign of embarrassment or regret. “The letter I assumed you got weeks ago and ignored?”

“Yeah.”

“You got _that_ letter, last night, and this morning you got on a plane to Chicago.”

“Um.... yes,” says Patrick.

Pete rises to his feet very gravely. He is the exact same height as Patrick, like the years of difference in their ages don’t exist, like their separate lives brought them to the exact same place regardless and it doesn’t really matter where exactly either of them started. “I think we’d better go make out in the men’s room,” he says.

“You want to make out in a public bathroom?”

“Yes.”

“A public bathroom in a major metropolitan international airport.”

“Yes.”

“A _men’s_ bathroom.”

“Yes.”

“You know those are usually disgusting?”

“I do.”

Patrick bites his lips from the inside, trying to keep the smile in. “Yeah, okay. Let’s do it.”

 

Thirty minutes later, Patrick remembers about his luggage.

They’ve more or less claimed the entire Terminal 2 baggage claim area men’s bathroom for themselves. Pete moved a Caution - Wet Floor sign from in front of a leaking sink to the center of the entryway, and the exaggerated, theatrical restroom-patron-repelling moans coming from the stall they took over don’t need to be faked. The acoustics in here are kind of incredible, Patrick noticed for the quarter of a second when he was capable of noticing things, before Pete’s lips touched his.

Like everything else about Pete, it’s better than he remembered, better than dreaming, better than his sticky-shameful fantasies. They kiss like they could kiss for hours: lips swollen, chins wet, cocks aching. Just making out, his hands on Pete’s hips or in Pete’s hair, is so insanely more than enough that he could lose himself here. Could lose hours, days. Could _Hotel California_ this whole moment. Could die of hunger or dehydration before getting enough, before he even considered moving on from kissing, trying for something more.

After so long without kissing Pete at all, it’s hard to remember why they ever fought about fucking. In what universe was kissing like this not enough?

“Oh, shit. My bag,” Patrick remembers, a tangled electrical signal finally working its way through his swampy brain, across aching eons of touchtouchtouch.

“Buy new stuff,” Pete suggests, catching his escaped lips in a continuation of this kiss, gripping the edge of Patrick’s clavicle and pressing him back against the wall. “Better than stopping.”

And Patrick would agree, but—

“My laptop. All my songs.”

At that, Pete breaks away. His eyes are smeary with bourbon-colored bliss, his cheeks flushed pink as boiling blood, his lips slick and shining and bitten big enough to eclipse all else from Patrick’s view. “Fuck,” Pete pants. He drops his bossy hands from Patrick’s chest and steps back, breathing hard, the outline of his dick visible through his jeans. “That’s important.”

Patrick, cold and dizzy without Pete pressed against him, immediately regrets what he’s said. “Wait,” he protests. “A minute more.”

Pete grabs his hand, squeezing their fingers together. “There’s no time to lose. The TSA has your laptop. We gotta save rock and roll!”

Patrick barely has time to grab his guitar case, lust-dazzled and Pete-blind and beginning to laugh, before Pete tugs him out of the stall. Hand-in-hand, through the busy airport, not caring about anything but that they’re together, they run.

 

Pete’s license is still suspended, so they take the El. Pete carries Patrick’s bag and refuses to tell him where they’re going. They stand side by side on the train, their shoulders bumping, Pete’s fingers hooking his back pocket almost-by-accident when the train rattles over rough track.

Patrick, bold enough to fly across the country to declare himself, now tongues tenderly at the words he would say, like the raw socket of a lost tooth. He keeps his jaw clamped around them, these biggest words he’s never said. He’s afraid of saying them, of how they’ll change in weight and substance under the coppery scrutiny of the open air. He’s afraid of not saying them. He’s afraid that if he doesn’t get the words out of his mouth, his own stupid, scared momentum will carry him right back onto a plane and into the life he doesn’t want anymore. His lips throb, hot marks swelling to rise on his neck where Pete has bruised him. He lives for the brush of Pete’s hand against his ass. He is real, knows for sure he is real, only in those places where Pete can touch him.

“What’s next?” Pete asks him softly.

“You won’t tell me,” Patrick reminds him.

Pete laughs, leans in, brushes his mouth across Patrick’s cheek, filling that stretch of skin with blood and color. “I meant, how long are you staying? When do I have to have you back at the airport, when do you turn back into a pumpkin?”

Patrick objects to the suggestion he was ever a _pumpkin_ —a chubbier and less dignified fruit is hard to think of—but he’s distracting himself, really, from the question. “I don’t have a return flight,” he says carefully, but when he hears the words out loud, he knows they’re not true enough. He tries again. “By which I mean… I don’t know if I’m going back. I’m not. I’m not going back.”

“What?” squawks Pete. He leans back to get a better look at Patrick. His thick, heavy brows make a hard line of disapproval and alarm.

Patrick swallows hard. Patrick is out of other options. That’s how he ended up here, on this train, in Chicago, with Pete. Because all the other things he thought he wanted were wrong. Because you don’t get to pick where on the map you’re going to find yourself. Because he’s just an outline til Pete fills him in. Because his whole heart and life and soul was in his music, and playing with Pete and his friends caused some kind of essential _shift_ , and his heart is no longer where he left it. Writing songs by himself isn’t enough anymore. It isn’t what he needs.

 _This_ is what he needs.

 _This_ is where his heart is.

 _This_ is the way his music is aching to be made.

So Patrick says, “I want to stay. Here. With you. With your band.”

Pete blinks rapidly, like he’s totally prepared to _say_ grand, startling romantic things but completely vexed at the prospect of _hearing_ them. “Was Joe really that persuasive?” he asks. He sounds a little wild, like he’s trying to give Patrick a way out of this sudden intensity, like he’s trying to give himself a way out.

The train rocks them bodily together, chests and hips knocking, the heat of that line of touch searing them both. Patrick feels a smile lifting the corners of his lips. His heart is rocketing with terror against the cage of his chest, and he feels amazing. He feels like he can do anything. He feels like he knows who he is and what he wants. It’s a good feeling. It’s a good fear.

Out the thick plastic windows, the unforgettable Chicago skyline rushes closer and closer. It’s a view he’s never seen before, but somehow it makes Patrick feel like coming home.

“Wasn’t Joe,” he says. “It was this other guy. This charming, ridiculous asshole who tricked me onstage, showed me a way to play music that I’d never felt before. Like being lit on fire, struck by lightning, some other horrible full-body thing that changes you, down to the molecules. You can try and act like you’re the same, after something like that, but you’re not. Your old life isn’t gonna fit anymore, because you’re different. You’re more _you_ than you’ve ever been in your life. You’re permanently changed.”

“This guy sounds pretty intense,” Pete manages to croak. He looks pale, though maybe that’s September slow-cloaking him in the feeling of fall, the summer sun gone goldenrod-red, turning Pete and his hot-ruby heart to autumn.

“Yeah,” Patrick agrees. There’s no stopping his smile now. It rises, rises to the surface of him, breaks across the skin. They soar towards Chicago and he grabs Pete’s hand, squeezes it between them. “I love him,” says Patrick. “I love you.”

 

Pete takes him to a Vietnamese bakery. It seems really specific—like, Patrick’s flying in from California, better hook him up with the well-known Chicago delicacy bahn mi?—but he wants to go anywhere, everywhere with Pete, so he doesn’t question it. Patrick gets a tofu bahn mi, Pete gets a coconut chicken curry one. They eat messily, quickly.

“You gonna tell anyone you’re here?” Pete asks, crunching a stray slice of jalapeño.

Patrick hates this question. Patrick hates this question because it tells him Pete isn’t taking him seriously. Pete doesn’t think he means it when he says _I want to stay_. So his response is a little snarky: “I mean, they’ll eventually notice I’m not in San Francisco. And one day soon I may even appear on the visible light spectrum, rendering me detectable by others.”

Pete begins breathing open-mouthed, his eyes wide and watering. “Seeds,” he gasps. “Hot seeds.” Patrick, who has watched Pete add red pepper flakes to every single thing he’s eaten in front of him, is pleased to see him thus compromised. Pete grabs Patrick’s blueberry-guava bubble tea and sucks down a large, unapproved gulp.

“Hey!” Patrick grouses. “Get your own.”

Pete makes a face like he’s breathing fire, drinks more of Patrick’s drink.

“I’ll buy you another one,” Pete promises, sucking hard on the straw, tears streaming down his cheeks.

“We both know you won’t,” Patrick says. Then, because why not strike while Pete’s unable to sling his usual bullshit, he presses, “I came back here because I—I want to do the band. For real. I want to do _you_ for real.”

Hearing it too late, Patrick flushes as red as peppered Pete. “I mean,” he sputters. “You know what I mean. No, actually, I think you _don’t_ know what I mean.”

“...What do you mean?” Pete asks. He is regaining his ability to speak, though his voice is tellingly strained.

Patrick counts off romantic gestures on his fingers. “I jumped on a cross-country flight as soon as I read your letter. I said I wanted to stay in Chicago, join your band, and pursue fame with you and your friends. I told you I loved you on an elevated fucking train. I mean that I don’t want time to be short anymore, for you and me. I don’t want it to be a casual summer fling where you make out with other people in plain view of my bedroom. I want to, like… be serious about each other. I want to be Danny Zuko at the end of _Grease_ , not the beginning. I want to be your boyfriend.”

“Wait. Are you saying I’m _Sandy_?”

“Well you’re not _Danny_. Unless you’re like, that dorky version of Danny who sucks at baseball.”

“Patrick, you’re _not cool_. You can’t be Danny.”

“I declare myself to you and you insult me in a Vietnamese place? Really? Let me be Danny!”

Pete squints at him appraisingly. Only moments after the ‘Peño Crisis of 2002, Patrick watches Pete shove another whole pepper slice into his mouth and chew it in consideration. “You can be Danny on one condition,” he says. “You get a cool leather jacket.”

“Do we need to race in an arroyo, too? First one around Dead Man’s Curve gets to be Danny Zuko? Or maybe it should be a dance-off.” Patrick makes a big show of rolling his eyes to conceal how close he is to laughing.

Pete grins, spreading his spicy lips and showing slightly curried teeth. “You would demolish me in a dance-off, T-Bird. Unless there was a live studio audience.”

Patrick prises what’s left of his drink out of Pete’s hand and finishes it, slurping pointedly. He flourishes his middle finger to let Pete know how hilarious he finds stage fright jokes. “Just tell me whether you’ll be my boyfriend? Please? You Pink Lady asshole?”

One of the things that makes it easiest to talk to Pete is how _annoying_ he is. Patrick is nervous til he gets mad, and then he’s so frustrated he can just say what he means without fear.  He should spend more time with assholes, maybe. It’s very freeing.

“I’m concerned,” Pete says slowly, which horribly does not sound very much to Patrick like _yes_ , “that you’re making an impulsive mistake.”

“Running away to San Francisco because I couldn’t face any other auditions was an impulsive mistake,” Patrick corrects him.

“...Demonstrating your tendency to make impulsive mistakes, yes,” says Pete. “We spent less than a month together, Rick. That letter… I maybe shouldn’t have written that letter. Now you want to throw away your whole education and uproot your life to pursue something that terrifies you?”

“ _Yes_ ,” Patrick says fiercely. What’s left of his shredded carrots and bahn mi crust are wilting visibly on his plate from his ire. “That’s exactly what I want to do.”

“And if I said I wasn’t in love with you?” asks Pete. In July, his face was so familiar, so dear. In September, he is a stranger. Patrick can’t read him at all.

Patrick’s hopeful heart goes cold in his chest. But to his surprise as much as anyone’s, what Pete’s saying doesn’t change his answer. He shrugs, his jaw set like steel, his determination burning like a hideous, scabby coal down in his guts. He’d rather move to Chicago and join a band for love, but if he has to, he’ll just do it for himself. He’ll do it for the music. He’ll do it to make a decision based on who he actually is and not just to avoid what he’s afraid of for once. He’ll do it to get fucked up, if he must, in order to move towards the things he wants. Even when those things scare him.

“Then it’ll be kind of awkward,” Patrick says confidently, “when I join your band.”

The look on Pete’s face is somewhere far afield of either a smile or a frown. “I’m older than you,” he says. “Like, a lot older than you.”

Of all the things Patrick worries about, their age difference isn’t one of them. Physical and sonic touch has closed that gap, and so many others, between them before. And it’s not like Pete’s so mature and worldly that he makes Patrick feel like a kid. Patrick’s seen Pete drink water tainted with his own piss before just because Joe dared him. Some might consider Patrick, the one with his own apartment and driver’s license, to be the adult, here. So he says, “I’ll catch up.”

“What about college, Patrick?” Pete asks. His voice is strained like he’s choking on another jalapeño. “You’re a real genius, you can’t just—”

“You got me into Northwestern.” Pete shuts up all at once. “I will consider enrolling for classes next semester and giving music school another try, if you will stop arguing with me right now.”

Pete opens his mouth like he’s got more prophecies of doom to share, but they’re here in Chicago and Patrick has finally found the feeling again, finally knows what’s right. “You don’t have to love me,” he announces, interrupting whatever gloomy thing Pete was about to portend. “But I think you did mean what you said in the letter. And I want to know, honestly, truly: do you want me? Do you want me still?”

“I live upstairs,” Pete blurts. “Um, in an apartment. With Andy and Joe. That’s why I brought you here, but I—I got nervous and led you to bahn mi instead.”

Patrick blinks, waiting for the purpose of this non sequitur to be revealed.

“Which is to say. Um. I do want you.”

Patrick keeps blinking. Pete sticks his hand across the table, reaches for Patrick, finally closing the chasm that he’s opened up between them. Patrick leans forward, pressing his shoulder into Pete’s touch, and feels the fraught uncertainty melt away. He knows in that moment that Pete wants him to stay. Pete still wants him to stay.

“What if we went upstairs,” Patrick says carefully, “and you showed me?”

Pete bites his lip, trying to hide his smile. “Will you let me be Danny?”

“I’ll let you be whoever you want to be,” says Patrick. Pete’s startled brown eyes reflect to them both how much Patrick sounds like he means it.

 

The apartment is old, peeling wood floors and exposed brick walls, white paint layered thick over rotting window molding and battered bedroom doors. You can tell it’s going to be trendy, eventually, when people with money and grown-up expectations about the functionality of plumbing fixtures start moving in.

Pete shows him the disgusting shower, which for some reason has a root beer keg in it; the pantry they one day aspire to afford groceries for; the best way to flop on the broken-backed couch; and Joe’s underwear drawer, for future prank reference. (Pete grabs two pairs for himself. “Hate the laundromat,” he says by way of explanation.) He conducts the whole tour at top speed, and in no time at all they’re standing on the threshold of what Patrick flew 2000 miles to see: Pete’s bedroom.

“And this is where the magic happens,” Pete says.

“You brought your Star Wars sheets,” Patrick observes, suddenly nervous.

“Did you think I owned any others?” Pete laughs. “So what do you think? You moving in?”

Patrick can’t tell if Pete is joking. “Well, there’s only three bedrooms. Where would I sleep?”

Pete grins, grabs Patrick by the hand, and pulls him down on the bed. “With me,” he says.

Now that there’s no shortage of time, Pete seems happy to rush.

Pete kisses him, slow at first, full-mouthed and full-clothed and somehow more intimate than any of the other things they have done together. He keeps his eyes open, looks at Patrick in a way that makes him feel seen into and through, a look that expands the borders and boundaries of him, a look that makes him limitless.

“I love you, summer boy,” Pete says.

“You gonna love me in the fall?” aks Patrick, his voice a little gaspy.

“That’s the plan.”

“Then I’ll love you in the winter,” Patrick promises.

“And I’ll love you in the spring.” Pete’s hand lands on Patricks hip, strokes the strip of skin exposed there. His canines flash, grinning in the space between their kisses. “Fuck you too, if you want,” he adds, like this is a casual thing to say, like penetrative sex wasn’t a major source of contention and/or six weeks of silence between them.

Patrick would laugh if it wasn’t so exasperating. “ _Now_ you’ll fuck me? I laid awake, miserable and horny and alone, on my last night in Illinois, broken-hearted over you? But now, now that we have all the time in the world—”

Pete interrupts, “I didn’t want to have sex with you if it didn’t mean anything. Didn’t want to fuck you if we had anything _less_ than all the time in the world.”

“You’re literally famous for your sexual indiscretions,” Patrick points out.

“Since we started hanging out, since that night at my mailbox? I have kissed exactly _one_ other person. And that was before I started kissing you.”

“But—the rooftop girl—”

“Girl, singular. You said it bothered you, Rick, and I never saw her again.”

Patrick is running out of things to be irritated about. “Isn’t it an arbitrary line to draw? Isn’t virginity, like, an outdated and patriarchal concept? We’ve done like, a bunch of things—”

Pete starts laughing at him. Laying there, tangled up with him, their lips inches apart, _laughing_ in his _face_. “And now you’ve said you love me, and I want to do this too. Unless you don’t want to?”

“I want to!” Patrick says, too eagerly, too loudly. Pete laughs harder.

“All the time in the world, huh? Good. Because I think I wanna take my time with you,” he says.

Pete won’t shut up til Patrick kisses him. Patrick files that knowledge away, knowing he’ll need it later—if this is how he makes Pete quiet, he’ll kiss his summer boyfriend all year long.

Then Pete is on him, and more than kissing is at stake. For once, Patrick isn’t anxious. He isn’t anything at all. Or: he’s Pete’s. He’s in Chicago. He’s in a band. He is someone, and at last, he knows exactly who.

  


_end_


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